


The Forty Miler

by thepointoftheneedle



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Carnival AU, F/M, Fluff, Mild Angst, Motorcycles, Slow Burn, Smut, Wall of Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:27:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25729678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepointoftheneedle/pseuds/thepointoftheneedle
Summary: A Forty Miler in Carney slang is a newcomer to carnival life who decides to join but then realises they've made a mistake before they've travelled forty miles from their home. Betty is the small town girl with a dysfunctional family, Jughead rides a motorcycle in the Wall of Death thrill show.  It's about belonging, about feeling like an outsider and about letting people make their own choices.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 181
Kudos: 123
Collections: 8th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	1. The Pirate's Life For Me

**Author's Note:**

> I was listening to Jenny by the Mountain Goats while I was writing. It's a banger! Here’s a bit...
> 
> You roared into the driveway  
> Of our southwestern ranch-style house  
> On a new Kawasaki  
> All yellow and black  
> Fresh out of the showroom  
> Our house faced west  
> So the big orange sun  
> Positioned at your back  
> Lit up your magnificent silhouette  
> How much better, how much better can my life get?  
> 900 cubic centimeters of raw, whining power, no outstanding warrants for my arrest  
> Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, the pirate's life for me  
> 

She could see that he was vibrating with nerves. He’d admitted it, self consciously, that morning as they lay in bed in the fancy hotel room. She’d woken with her head against his chest, his arm around her shoulders, but his breathing wasn’t as deep and slow as it usually was. She could hear his heart, strong, regular, but just a little fast. She looked up to see that those beautiful eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. Nervous. She’d taken his mind off it, smiling at him and kissing his chest, his belly, making him gasp and moan and then hum with pleasure as she bent over him. Now, up on the stage, he was running his long fingers through his hair over and over again, self soothing it was called. Her own fingers twitched with the desire to stroke his cheek, take his hand in her own, to reassure him with her touch that he could do this, that he was going to be great. It made her laugh that this, of all things, a tent full of literature nerds at a book festival, should scare him. All he had to do was smile, say “Hi” and read something aloud like he’d done many times before. A tweedy guy called Rupert introduced him while he sat uncomfortably folded into a chair that was too low to accommodate his long legs, fiddling with the cap of a water bottle. He was longing for a cigarette; she saw it in the way his foot tapped on the wooden stage. She leaned across to Archie and whispered, “He’s so scared. It’s kind of adorable.” Archie rolled his eyes. People thought it was weird that she was best pals with her high school ex but they cared for each other even if their romantic relationship had overreached their feelings.

She looked back at the stage. The introduction seemed to be causing him physical pain. He flinched at the first sentence and it just got worse. Apparently he was “a truly original writer, perhaps **the** true original.” His works were stunning displays of masterful writing. His powerful depictions of setting made them locations of riveting human drama, of growth, kindness, struggle, and tragedy. She wasn’t sure if Rupert was trying to seduce him or if he just really liked his books. Either way he obviously hated it. He was staring at his boots, head lowered so his hair fell forward in a dark cascade that made her need to touch him even more urgent. As if he felt it, he glanced around the tent, his eyes catching on hers and, as tweedy Rupert continued to eulogise him, she quickly looked down, her shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter, her hands clasped. She absolutely couldn’t look up at him or they would both start to giggle out loud. Finally Rupert stopped the torture and looked meaningfully at him and he stood, to applause that clearly surprised and intimidated him. 

She glanced up as he looked over at her again, her eyes a place of safety for him. She gave him an encouraging smile and then, for devilment, looked shamelessly at his crotch and licked her lips. He disguised his laugh as a cough and approached the podium just as his publisher, Veronica, squeezed along the row, “Excuse me-ing” and spiking people’s toes with her Louboutins. She kissed Betty on the cheek as she sat, glancing enquiringly at Archie next to her. “This is my old friend Archie. Archie, Veronica is his publisher,” Betty hissed. Something, a glance perhaps, maybe pheromones, possibly a magnetic pulse, passed between them and the hard assed, no nonsense, fierce operator that was Veronica Lodge began to flip her hair and giggle softly like a high schooler. That was interesting. Up on stage he was speaking now.

“Hi everyone. Thanks for the intro, friend. I can’t live up to it so I’ll just do what I’ve been asked here to do and read something for you. I thought I’d give you some of the non fiction this afternoon. In case you don’t know I’m a carney, from three generations of carneys. It’s OK, I won’t steal your wallets, I don’t need to.” The audience laughed but she knew as well as him that if they met in that other life they would have patted their jacket pockets as they walked away. “This is an essay about the carnival where I grew up.”

He began to read and at once she was there with him, the midway glittering before them, full of promise and threat, bringing them together but always doing its damnedest to tear them apart.

**“Growing up on the midway I had no idea that the name came from Chicago’s Midway Plaisance, where the World’s Fair was once held. To me the midway meant midway between what I knew and what excluded me, the juncture of two worlds, where my life could almost touch the lives of the self-satisfied, milk-fed straights. They were exotic creatures, pink skinned, hair like corn silk waiting to be shucked. I say almost touch, but not quite; the midway was semi permeable like the blood brain barrier, money and food could cross but rarely people. We were together in that space but kept separate by mutual mistrust and prejudice. Like a contested border, we’d skirmish across it but always retreat back to our own side. The conventional view is that the midway’s glamour obfuscates the sordid, tacky reality, glitter over rot, face-paint over sores. I’ve never bought that take. The darkness is what we sell you; the dirt, the rank, enseaméd sweat of it. We illuminate it for you, in innumerable, greasy, coloured bulbs.**

In her mind she was cast back to become, once again, a little blonde haired girl running pell mell around the legs of grown ups, slaloming a reckless path through the midway, gasping and giggling, ducking around dogs and strollers, occasionally misjudging her trajectory and earning an angry yell or even a shove. She could hear her mom’s voice, screaming in the distance, “Elizabeth Cooper, you get back here right this very second. Hal, Hal, your daughter!” She had no intention of returning to her parents who, traitorously, had already begun to make preparations to leave the carnival when they’d seen barely any of the attractions, tasted almost none of the delicious smelling food and had experienced only one stupid children’s ride. She was going to stay forever, bed down under the counter of a sugar shack and live at the carnival, be one of the pretty ladies in sequins who stood on the little stage and never have to eat her broccoli or go to school ever again. She could hear her father’s heavy, pounding footsteps and even heavier breathing in pursuit and paused to look around frantically for a place to hide. Unexpectedly, a thin arm reached out from under one of the canopied booths, grabbed her wrist and tugged. She swerved through the fabric and found herself in a cool, dark sanctuary with a small boy. 

“Thanks,” she panted. “That was close.”

“Why’re they chasing you?” he asked, not quite meeting her eyes.

“My parents. They want to take me home and make me eat broccoli and go to bed early so I’ll be “rested for school.” She imitated her mother’s voice in a mocking way.

“What’s wrong with that?” he asked, genuinely curious now, looking up questioningly. His eyes were so blue that she couldn’t help staring. She didn’t know eyes could be that colour. Her grandmother collected stone eggs; she didn’t know what for. Sometimes she was allowed to play with them as long as she kept them on the rug and didn’t drop them. One of them was exactly that colour blue. Laps something, lapis? Anyway his eyes looked like that egg.

“You have pretty eyes,” she said. “I don’t want to go home. I want to stay here and see everything and go on all the rides and eat funnel cake and cotton candy and see the shows and watch clowns and never go to school again.”

“You’d get bored of it pretty soon. I’m bored of it,” he muttered, seeming suddenly much older than her even though he was a little smaller. He was wrong because she’d never get bored if she could just stay at the carnival forever and ever. Especially if she could stay at the carnival with the boy with the blue eyes.

“I’m Betty,” she offered, “Elizabeth really, but everyone calls me Betty. Except my mom when she’s mad with me. Which is all the time.”

“Jughead,” he said. 

“What? Why are you called Jughead? Is that even a real name?” She supposed that it might be rude to say that about someone’s name but he didn’t seem to mind, just shrugged.

“I dunno. I’ve got other names but they’re the same as my dad’s so I guess they call me something different so as not to muddle us. But my mom always just calls my dad “your father” or “the drunk” or “him” so there really isn’t that much confusion.” 

They sat together under the canvas and talked for a long time, Betty was more interested in him than elephant ears or candy apples. His dad rode a motorcycle in something called the Wall of Death which sounded like such a cool job compared to her dad who just read boring newspapers all day. His mom was actually one of the pretty ladies. She danced with snakes and lots of people paid to watch her. “Mostly men,” he said. “I think it’s got something to do with S.E.X.”

He seemed so worldly wise. She didn’t have a clear idea of what S.E.X. even was but she nodded sagely so he wouldn’t know. He didn’t go to school but he said that he read a lot and he could choose what he wanted to learn about. He knew a lot about pirates and dinosaurs but had no idea what fractions were and when she tried to explain he said they sounded boring so she asked him more about the Flying Dutchman which was another of his enthusiasms. She relaxed a little too much because, as he explained the differences between brigantines and schooners, she must have pushed aside the cloth and her mom was gripping her arm with her pointed fingernails and dragging her upright and yelling and yelling. She didn’t stop yelling until they got home. They didn’t make her eat any broccoli because she was sent straight to bed without dinner, grounded and in disgrace. She didn’t care about that but she cried because she hadn’t got the chance to say goodbye to her new friend and she already missed him.

Now, looking back on that beginning, she could see the threads that would weave their narrative already in place. Even then she had sensed that the life she was being told to live would stifle her, just as it was stifling her parents. That was why she was running down the midway, trying to break free. At home joy was measured out in tiny doses so as not to overexcite. Only one cookie after school, only one piece of candy each day after trick or treating, only a ribbon in her hair for church on Sunday. Like there could ever be too much joy in the life of an eight year old child. Jughead seemed to embody the freedom for which she longed and to her he represented the way life could be lived if she could just escape from the tight hair elastics and stiff leather Mary Janes that bound her so uncomfortably. She couldn’t have guessed that, to have the liberty that he had, she would have to sacrifice the warm bed, the full belly, the clean, pressed clothes. It never occurred to her to judge whether an impudent word would result in a blow or in being shoved out of her home, the door locked behind her til morning. She knew now that he had made those calculations every day. His father’s job was exciting but she knew her daddy would come home every night. Jug never had that certainty, never had any firm ground to stand on. His life had always been lived in defiance of gravity, on the edge of calamity. Those experiences, she understood now, changed the fabric of who they became, her lust for the new, his yearning for the familiar, her need to be real, to be authentic, his desperation not to shake foundations too hard for fear they would fall in on him. As he said, the midway wasn’t really a point of intersection. She’d been able to see into another world but she hadn’t been able to cross over. She wanted, like Alice, to climb through the looking glass and stay there always. What it had taken her years to understand was that he had wanted to climb the other way.

 **For a townie, the carney is the epitome of otherness, how life would look, if you abrogated your responsibilities. The husband, bored by the nine to five, imagines how it would be if he took to drink and loose women, gambled away his pay check and sent his wife out to sell herself to feed his babies. The wife contemplates a world in which she could eat ice cream for breakfast, not concern herself with anyone’s laundry or diet but her own, have the kind of sex she wants rather than the perfunctory missionary pistoning to which duty obliges her, abandon her children on a whim. But the teetering edifice of your social order would collapse if people actually followed through on those fantasies. The purpose of the other, the dissident, the heretic is to serve as a warning to good citizens. The maintenance of the commonwealth requires that our otherness be demonstrably repugnant, that our existence should repel you back to conformity. And of course you let us know that it does. Hence our mutual mistrust.**

On the first day of fourth grade Betty showed her teacher an entire composition book she had filled with an epic story about Jughead the pirate captain and his crew of desperados. She had worked on it for long hours during her vacation. Before the summer break she had been so excited when, on her way to school with her friend Archie, she had seen a poster for the carnival. She was longing for salt water taffy and corn dogs, for the carousel and the sequin ladies but mostly she was desperate to see her friend Jughead. She hoped he remembered her.

Then Polly caught the whooping cough. She had to stay in her room, coughing and coughing and drinking gallons of hot tea with honey. The day before the carnival came, revealing a profound unfairness in the universe that staggered her, Betty woke up coughing. She tried so hard not to let her mom know she was sick, but the coughing fits exploded out of her, so loud and so long that she knew it was hopeless. Her mother brought her hot tea and even stroked her back when the coughing fit passed but she said there would be no carnival for the Coopers this year. Betty cried for a week with the pain of the coughing and the disappointment of missing the sideshows and the clowns but, most of all, because she wouldn’t see her friend. By next year he would have forgotten all about her. Even worse he might think she had forgotten about him.

She spent the summer isolated from Archie and her other pals, feeling lonely and sad. Eventually she found a self soothing technique of her own. Her imagination could let her be with her friend, having adventures on the high seas, escaping in her mind even when she couldn’t escape in reality. As she’d written her story, wracked with coughing, she’d been wondering if the real Jughead had missed her. He lived at the carnival so she supposed he would have much better things to think about than her. When the carnival wasn’t in town Betty’s excitements were very humdrum. The tooth fairy left her four dollars for her incisors. She got hit in the face with a baseball which gave her a black eye. She even had to wear a patch for a couple of days. She wished Jughead could have seen her. She tried talking like a pirate to Archie but he didn’t understand the game and wouldn’t join in. When anything important happened, like when the third graders’ pet rat got loose and escaped into the hallway, she thought about telling Jughead. It was strange that they had only met once for a couple of hours but she still thought about him often. She wondered what he was reading and if he had found out about fractions yet. She wondered if he had learned to ride a bike like she had and how much he’d gotten from the tooth fairy. She wondered what he had got for Christmas. Most kids she knew were on their best behaviour in December, bribing Santa with good report cards in exchange for presents but she was at her most obedient as the weather turned warmer, her mother realising that the words “…or there’ll be no carnival for you young lady,” would make her more wayward daughter buckle down instantly. For Christmas Santa had brought her roller skates even though she had asked for a phone. She couldn’t even use the skates because of the snow that lay in Riverdale until February. Santa apparently thought she was too young to be responsible with her own phone not understanding that she had only wanted it so she could give Jughead the number at the carnival next summer. He’d have told her about snakes and clipper ships, about the Wall of Death and all the towns he’d seen. Roller skates were useless for that. 

Her teacher was impressed by the sheer volume of the pirate story and suggested that perhaps she’d be a writer when she grew up. Betty had thought she’d rather be a pirate. Now, looking up at the stage, focused on his face as he read, the shy boy he had been was still there. So was the pirate captain, the author, the daredevil and so many other aspects and iterations if you knew just how to look. And she did know. 

**What we are being paid to show you is that the deep fried Oreos look and smell delicious but, if you indulge yourself as you wish, you’ll be left with the crashing depression that follows the euphoria, greasy fingers and, probably, catastrophic digestive emergencies for days. Even the most trusting and innocent soul comes to understand, for a relatively modest outlay, that easy money is never really easy. The churns won’t fall, the hoopla angles are all wrong and if you want to make a buck then you’d better get back to the line or the field. You know we swindle you but you look at us and see we’re hungry like you’ve never been hungry. Carney children learn by the time they’re nine or ten that they have to turn a buck if they’re to deserve room and board. There’s no easy money for us either.**

At the end of August just after she turned ten Polly came back from the mail box and threw a postcard in front of her. On the front was a picture of the Illinois State Fair main entrance and on the back four closely written lines of sloping, spiky black cursive that she ran her fingers across again and again. _“Betty, here’s your stamp back. I’m not so interested in pirates these days. I’ve been reading a lot about monsters. I like Frankenst ~~ie~~ ein best, the monster not the doctor; he’s pretty much a douche. I’ve been studying some math too but it’s pretty hard with no-one to explain it. If you want you can write me here until the end of the month but don’t feel obliged. Thanks for the stamp. Jughead Jones”_

She was giddy with excitement and bounced up from the table, slopping juice and milk over the cloth, earning her mother’s outraged remonstrances. Polly rolled her eyes with the world weariness of a thirteen year old who has put away childish things. It was ten weeks and four days since the carnival.

The Coopers had walked through the midway together, her mother holding her hand like a vice after her misbehaviour on their previous visit. She was allowed to choose just one snack, finally settling on a tiger’s blood snow cone. The line was shorter which meant more time for exploration and she had a bad feeling that corndogs or funnel cake would make an early reappearance on the Tilt-A-Whirl. The snow cone also lasted longer than most other treats and the syrup would make her fingers taste of strawberry coconut until they got home. She knew by now that she had to eke out her pleasures. Alice and Polly went off together to look at the stands selling cheap jewellery and little animals made from glass while Hal took his younger daughter to experience the rides and games. He let her ride the carousel on her own, aback a giraffe with a sinister grin, and then they both went on the slowest of the Tilt-A-Whirl rides and the Ferris wheel. She loved the mechanism of the rides, all that iron and complex machinery employed in the service of fun, not making anything, not getting anywhere, a joy locomotive. He’d clearly had enough of the rides because he then tried in vain to win her an obviously off brand Monsters Inc. stuffed toy at a stand where players had to throw balls into large baskets. He did get the balls to their targets a couple of times but with a suspicious flip they bounced right out again. He muttered something about “swindlers” as they walked away, empty handed, but Betty thought it was only smart of the carnival people not to give away their prizes too easily and, if they gave one to her dad, it would definitely be too easy.

Finally, at the edge of the ground she’d seen him. He stood, leaning against the ticket booth of the fun slide, scowling while he handed out burlap sacks to protect kids’ clothing when they took their turn sliding. Betty tugged on her father’s hand and asked if she could please go on the slide, it looked so fun. Hal was surprised that such a tame entertainment had taken her interest and willingly paid for her ticket. She walked over to her friend and said “Hello Jughead. Do you remember me? I’m Betty.”

He held out a sack, looking down at his feet glumly. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Did you miss me last year? I had the whooping cough. I coughed all summer. Sometimes it made me throw up. It was gross. I got a bike. And a baseball hit me in the face and I had an eye patch like a pirate. Do you still like pirates?” She wondered why he was still looking at his feet.

“You going up or what?” he mumbled.

“I’m not bothered about it. I only got a ticket so I could come talk to you. What’s wrong?” Now he looked up at her, his blue eyes staring into hers in surprise. His eyes were still so pretty but she saw that he had big dark circles under them and he looked as pale as a ghost.

“Why’d you wanna talk to me?” His voice was low but she could hear the suspicion in it.

“Because you’re my friend. You’re the most interesting person I’ve ever talked to. I’m always thinking of all the things I want to tell you and ask you. Why wouldn’t I want to talk to you?” This wasn’t how she wanted their meeting to be. He was wasting so much time. Now her dad was yelling from the other side of the ticket booth, telling her to either go up the slide or come back out.

“You’d better go,” Jughead mumbled, looking at his feet again. She had prepared for this moment although she had imagined that they would have had a more satisfactory conversation on the way to it.

“OK,” she said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a folded slip of paper. “This is my address. Write to me. Send me a letter or a postcard or something. If you know where you’re going to be you can tell me and I’ll write back. I put a stamp there too in case you don’t have any at your house…or…where you live. Will you? Please?” He gave a non committal shrug and she handed back the sack. “I don’t feel like sliding.” He reached out to take it and, on an impulse, she reached out one arm and pulled him into an awkward side hug before running back out to her dad and explaining that she got scared because the slide looked taller close up. She didn’t even mind when her dad said it was all probably too much excitement for one day and they should head over and meet up with her mom and sister and get going. Soon, she was sure, there would be a letter especially for her in the mail.

She had run to the mailbox every single day for two months and no letter came. The summer passed as slowly as poured molasses. She didn’t understand why he didn’t write to her. She’d given him a stamp and everything. Eventually she talked to Archie about it and he said maybe Jughead didn’t write so well and he was ashamed or maybe he thought girls were nasty like Reggie did. She didn’t think that either of those could be the reason.

But now, at last, it was here. She ran upstairs, clutching her postcard, grabbed her school backpack and her library card along with the meagre remains of her summer allowance and dashed out of the house, yelling “Library,” over her shoulder towards her dad who was working on something in the garage. She asked the high school kid on the library desk about Frankenstein and she pointed to the fiction section and said “Mary Shelley” as she cracked her gum. Betty found the volume quickly and dragged it onto the floor to begin to read. She was a little scared by the lurid illustration on the front cover but by the time she was a page into the story she was riveted, even though she had to fetch a dictionary to help her understand the bigger words. She liked thinking that the book was like a place that she and Jughead could meet, she and her friend, separated by so many miles, could be together on the deck of Walton’s icebound ship. She read for over an hour until Victor had begun to realise the horror of the thing he had made. She couldn’t wait a moment longer. She snatched her pen and a page from her binder and began to write.

_Dear Jughead,  
Thank you for sending the postcard. I am at the library right now reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I like it very much so far. I can’t take it home because it is in the adult section and I only have a junior card so I’ll just have to come and read it here every day. I especially like Elizabeth and not just because she has the same name as me. It was so sad when Victor’s mother died. The creature is pretty scary. I have to look up a lot of things but I don’t mind that because I like to learn new words. This is the hardest book I have read. I guess you will think the things that I read are babyish. I like the Nancy Drew stories a lot and read all of them over and over. I also like A Wrinkle in Time and The Little House on the Prairie. Have you read them?_

_I know what you mean about math. It can be pretty hard. I hope it’s OK that I’m putting a book in with this letter. It might help. If you get stuck just write me and I’ll try to help if I can._

_Please write back and tell me all about the carnival. What is the Illinois State Fair like? Is it big? What else is there besides the carnival? I don’t have anything interesting to write about because nothing happens here. My friend Archie almost got held back in fourth grade. He would have had to stay at elementary school a year longer! I helped him a bit with his reading and he’ll be allowed to move up to middle school with everyone else next year. Phew!_

_Anyway, I’m going to post this now so that there will be time for you to write back before you leave Illin ~~io~~ ois. I know you said I shouldn’t feel obliged to reply but I want you to feel obliged. Please write me back and tell me what you liked about Frankenstein the best._

_Your friend  
Betty Cooper_

She hid Frankenstein under the cushions of the couch in the kids’ reading area so nobody else could take it out and ran to the post office just down the street where she bought a big brown envelope and put her letter in, followed by her own math textbook from last year. She wasn’t sure how old Jughead was but she guessed it didn’t matter too much about what grade he should be in since he didn’t go to school. She sealed the envelope and daringly kissed the flap before handing it over the counter and paying the alarmingly expensive postage. Still it was worth it, he was worth it.

She got her reply four days later. He wrote her a long letter about Frankenstein. His view was that the creature was scary only because he was scared and so different. He asked her to imagine how it must be for him to suddenly be alive, not knowing who or even what he was. Because Victor had been so wrapped up in his own plans he’d never even thought about what kind of life the creature would have. The surprising thing he said was that he felt like the creature most of the time. He said that his favourite line was “I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all.” He said he’d written that part out and put the paper on the wall near his bed.

He thanked her for the math book and said that he would try to understand it. He’d never had a book like that one before and he asked if it would really be OK to ask her questions when he got stuck. Then he gave her the itinerary for September, Hutchinson Kansas, Wichita Falls Texas and said that she could write to the show grounds and he’d pick up mail when he arrived. He said that he had read some of The Little House on the Prairie but he didn’t like it except when her ma slapped the bear. He had liked the Nancy Drew that he had read but he hadn’t heard of A Wrinkle In Time. He said he liked Edgar Allen Poe’s stories but some of them were pretty scary and she might be too little to read them. 

A correspondence was established. She wrote him at the state and county show grounds and he replied with new addresses. Sometimes a letter went astray and there was a disappointing hiatus but she’d just write again and he’d reply like the break hadn’t happened. For a few months each winter she could write to him in Florida where the carneys went to repair the rides and restock with cheap prizes, slum as he called it. She’d pick up textbooks whenever her school was throwing old ones out and mail him copies which he seemed to devour. It was hard for him to get books of any description because he had no library card so he’d read pretty much everything that any of the carnies had, even though the books were too old for him.

He wrote her descriptions of the midway, the precursors to the essay he was reading now, from his own book, at a literary festival thronged with people who didn’t know an Orbiter from a Zipper. He wrote about a sea of white Mid Western farm folks, their wallets chained to their belt loops to prevent the “low life carneys” stealing from them, seeing something other than their own livestock and their wives for the first time in a year and not seeming to like any of it too well. He’d write accounts of the scams and deceits that the carnival folk would use to extract cash from the marks, the ways they’d encourage suckers to part with more and more cash and yet always have a reason not to pay out, an alibi he called it. He wrote about the tricks that the operators used to teach the loudest and most belligerent of the townies a lesson by encouraging them onto the scariest rides and frightening them half to death, spinning them in the Gravitron to the point of unconsciousness. The descriptions that she liked best were of the side of the carnival that townies like her never got to see. He wrote about setting up his dad’s wall of death, the roustabouts’ teamwork and jokes as well as their skill as they ensured that not a drop of fatal grease found its way onto the inside of the drum because that would allow the wheel to slip and his dad to fall to his doom. His descriptions of the deserted Midway after the crowds left, as the sky turned purple and the neon was switched off were poetic and gritty and melancholy. The sweet, corrupt smell of the trash cans, the crumple of discarded food wrappers attracting nonchalant rats, the fizz and crackle of the bug killers on the poles incinerating fat mosquitoes all made her long for the carnival and even more for the months to pass so that they could actually talk in person.


	2. You Pointed Your Headlamp Toward The Horizon

He was starting to relax into the reading now, slowing down, looking around the audience a little. He didn’t love this aspect of his career, didn’t think his work lent itself to reading aloud, but he understood the business imperative. He was the talker on the bally stage, trying to get the crowd, the tip, to buy their tickets. He was selling a book instead of a girl show but the principle was the same. The extract was just the glimpse of a sequinned leotard; they’d have to pay to see his soul fully naked.

**The midway is a locus of heightened feeling. Take the thrill rides. That’s where you pay people who you don’t trust further than you can spit us to put you through something for which, under any other circumstances, you’d press charges. Take the Skycoaster, the one where a dude with greasy hair, straps you into a harness that looks humiliatingly like a diaper, your pants bunched between your legs like you’re wicked aroused. You’re hoisted three hundred feet in the air while everyone from your bible study group watches, judging you. We let you hang there a while, spreadeagled against the evening sky. If we’re lucky the loose change will fall from your pocket and you’ll whimper low in your throat and we’ll snigger. We like to know you’re getting the thrill you paid for. Then the release, screaming thinly as you freefall towards the ground, your destruction averted at the last moment by a cable tether, and back up, before you swing to and fro in decreasing arcs over the park, helpless as a baby in a terrible cradle. And you pay us for that.**

**It’s hardly a surprise, with all that adrenaline coursing through the blood, that other emotions are near the surface too. Placid, bovine farm guys get riled when, in front of their best girl, they can’t hit the shooting gallery ducks with the air rifle pellet. High school jocks lose their cool when they see some long haired yahoo who operates a carousel, sneak a hand up their girlfriend’s leg as he lifts her off a painted pony. It’s not just rage though. Girls fall in lust with the exotic looking guy who swallows swords or eats fire and they decide to throw in the job in the drugstore and join the carnival. She makes love to her beau in the storage compartment under his truck on a summer evening and he whispers endearments to her in Ciazarn. That storage compartment is less appealing when it’s raining in Baton Rouge and the fire eater has bad breath and she’s throwing up in the morning and hopes to God it’s the fumes from the paraffin.**

There had been a fight the first year that she was allowed to go to the carnival with her friends, solemnly promising her mom to stay in a group. They rode the clacking rollercoaster, paired up for the Ferris wheel and insulted each other in the fun house, pointing to the trick mirrors and claiming that a pal looked much hotter, slimmer, more muscular in the twisted reflection. Her promise not to go off alone was broken as soon as she spotted him. Jughead was standing behind a booth where the gullible were encouraged to knock over miniature milk churns with a wooden ball. If he wanted custom he probably should have been yelling but he was just leaning against the counter sulkily. He looked even skinnier, the circles under his eyes were darker and his clothes were dirtier. He was shy and reserved at first but they talked about books again and he warmed to the theme. It was war poetry this time; he’d learned “I have a rendezvous with Death” by heart. Finally he paused, looked at her intently and told her that his mom had left, taking his little sister. There were tears in his eyes but he brushed them away with an impatient hand. “So, just me and the drunk now. And you can’t ride the wall drunk if you want to live, so just me soon. When I hear the crowd scream I think he’s dead, every time. And I don’t even know how I feel about it.” She wanted to hug him but a high school kid, with a girlfriend draped around him like a scarf, wanted to throw to win a cross-eyed stuffed animal. Jughead rolled his eyes and mouthed “Cake eater,”at her which she knew meant “dumb local.” Surely everyone knew that the churns were weighted if they weren’t actually nailed down? The transparency of the scam had given Jughead a quiet evening but apparently this mooch wanted to throw. 

Jughead gave him the three balls. He missed with two but hit the churns squarely with the third. They didn’t fall and Jughead just shrugged as the guy started to yell. When he jumped the booth, put his hands on Jughead’s shoulder and pulled back a fist to land a blow, Jughead, half his size, ducked, kicked him in the shin, stood to punch him with an uppercut and the dumb jock went down in a heap. Unfortunately three of his pals were running over to give succour to their fallen comrade. Jug took one look at them, said “Get outta here Betty. See you next year,” and then yelled ‘Hey Rube!” at the top of his lungs.

Summoned by the distress call of the cornered carney a crowd of Jughead’s fellow booth workers and side show agents ran to his aid as the high school kids realised their vulnerability and turned tail only to meet an even bigger crowd of local guys keen to get involved in some guilt free trouble. Betty ran as the first few blows were landed. She worried for days that Jughead had been hurt but then a postcard arrived that just said, “All the fun of the fair! JJ”

The next year there was another fight, smaller but with much more devastating consequences for her. Betty was thirteen and she’d been wondering whether Jughead was her penpal or her boyfriend. She’d been reading Wuthering Heights so she wrote to him about it, asking if he thought that people could meet someone who was going to be the great love of their life when they were children as Cathy had. She also wanted to know if he felt sorry for Heathcliff. He said that Heathcliff was a dick, which had been his preferred epithet for several months that year. If Heathcliff really cared about Cathy, he said, he would have been glad that she could love someone less difficult, someone better for her. He thought that Heathcliff should have stayed in his exile and that it was definitely his fault she died. As he rightly said though, that would have made for a pretty boring story. She had thought he’d be on the side of the dark haired gypsy child but his reading intrigued and surprised her. She’d been looking forward to talking to him about it.

She went to the carnival with Archie who took her parents’ admonitions very seriously and tried to stick with her when they got to the midway. She was too cunning for him and ditched him while he queued to buy her a scoop of kettle corn. She knew where to look for Jughead because he’d written that he was working the pay booth for his dad’s Wall of Death thrill show. When she approached they were between shows so he flipped the ‘Back Soon’ sign and came out to greet her with a quick hug, blushing a little as he did it. They sat on the steps at the back of the booth talking about how happy he was not to be in the mid west which he had come to hate with a passion and about the accident his dad had at the end of last summer and which had meant that they had stayed even longer in Florida that winter. Because nothing of any note had happened in Betty’s life she talked about what she had read and, as usual, he had somehow managed to read everything before her. He looked at her intently for a moment and she paused in her explanation of her reading of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. He said “Can I tell you a secret?”

She wondered if he was going to say that he liked her but actually he said “I want to be a writer someday, like, write books and stuff. Is that dumb?” 

She began to say that he was already a writer when a tall, dark haired boy appeared around the side of the Wall of Death, stared at them and yelled, “Hey Jones has got himself a little townie girlfriend. Hey Jones, the baby needs milk.” Betty had no idea what was going on but Jughead was blushing beet red and clenching his fists. The boy continued, “Jug, you want the key to the possum belly under our truck, take your girl and show her what'cha got?” Jug was off the steps in a heartbeat and launching himself at the other boy who had almost a foot of height on him, His fists were flying but the taller boy simply put a hand on his head and held him at arm’s length, looking amused. Eventually he bored of the game and simply grabbed a flailing arm and twisted it behind Jughead’s back. “You give up? Or you want I should break it again?”

Jug slumped, his head lowered almost to his belly and mumbled “Give up.” The boy laughed again, a sharp bark, and let go so that Jug collapsed to the ground, now pale with shame and rage. 

Betty ran over to him. “Did he really break your arm before? Are you OK?” He wouldn’t meet her eye, staring at the ground by his feet. She noticed he had a hole in the toe of his boots. Everything seemed to slow down and she realised that something was shifting between them. 

“I gotta get back to work now. Bye Betty,” he mumbled, holding his arm awkwardly. He always said that he’d see her next year, not bye, he never said that. 

She looked at him, alarmed. “See you next year?” she said, her voice a little too high.

“Whatever,” he mumbled and disappeared back to his job, without her.

The consequence of that fight was that he stopped replying to her letters. She wasn’t sure if it was something she’d said or if he was embarrassed to have been bested in front of her. It didn’t make her think less of him, not at all. She wracked her brain for something that he’d like to read until, a couple of pages into The Catcher in the Rye, she realised it was perfect for him and bought a copy with her allowance, packaging it carefully and posting it to the Illinois State Fairground, even though he hadn’t sent her his itinerary for the summer. Three weeks later it came back with a note from him. It was hard to see his dear, familiar handwriting saying those cool, cruel words. “Hi Betty, thanks for sending the book. I don’t have time for reading or writing letters these days so you’d better have this back. I hope that you do real well and have a good time in high school. Best wishes, Forsythe (Jughead) Jones III. She cried when she got the letter and every time she thought of him afterwards for a long time. She thought of him pretty often. Polly had broken up with a couple of boyfriends and she was always sad for a week or so but Jughead hadn’t even been her boyfriend. She’d broken up with a penpal and felt devastated. She didn’t really understand what had happened, going over their last meeting again and again, never making it make sense. 

The fight changed her life in other ways too. One Saturday, a few weeks after he rejected her, her school assignments were up to date and she was feeling bored and out of sorts. Listlessly she wandered down to the garage to see what her dad found to occupy himself when he was hiding out from her mom. He had dismantled a car engine and was cleaning and reassembling it. The steps of the assembly were printed in a book, logically numbered, with diagrams. She was fascinated. She realised that it was possible to find a broken thing, take it to pieces, find the problem and put it back together as good as new simply by following a set of unequivocal instructions. That notion was endlessly appealing to her. Her actions would have a completely predictable outcome, unlike her interactions with people who seemed prone to spin away from her in random directions. Her dad seemed to enjoy her company and was patient with his explanations, giving her little assembly jobs of her own and showing her how to use and maintain the tools. From then on Betty would spend all day Saturday and at least one evening a week working on engines with her dad. He even promised that they would build her a car together when she got her licence. 

Working on machines was a good way to avoiding thinking of him, forcing her attention elsewhere, when the idea “I must tell Jughead,” popped into her head. She attempted more complex projects, outstripping her dad’s ambitions and skill, building a line following robot that blew all the other kids’ projects out of the water. She still read but, when a turn of phrase struck her or she correctly predicted a plot twist, it hurt her heart that she couldn’t tell him about it so she focused on engineering projects with their comforting lack of ambiguity instead. They used up less emotional bandwidth and yet kept her brain completely engaged, stopped her thoughts wandering. She began to think about taking engineering courses in college. 

Another way to keep him out of her thoughts was dating. One day at lunch Archie sat beside her. “Hey Betty, I don’t want to go to homecoming stag again this year. I thought we may as well go together. What do you think?” Betty nodded without too much enthusiasm because it was less complicated than turning him down. He was her friend and no-one else wanted to go with her. Her mom was pleased she was “making an effort” and gave her some money to buy a dress but she borrowed one from Polly and spent the money on her own set of socket wrenches. She’d be able to use them almost everyday rather than for a few hours once a year. The dance was perfectly pleasant and afterwards Archie kissed her and she let him because she thought that it was expected of her and she had no strong feelings about it either way. She found, guiltily, that if she closed her eyes and imagined lapis lazuli eyes behind an unruly tangle of black hair, she could almost enjoy it. She remembered every bashful side hug and innocent cheek kiss she’d shared with Jughead but forgot Archie’s kisses as soon as they were over. The fact was that she couldn’t have who she wanted and sophomore girls were supposed to have boyfriends. Archie was kind, wouldn’t push her further than she was prepared to go, so they were dating now, apparently. Still even if it lasted until senior year, they’d break up before college. Betty would work hard, get great grades and reinvent herself at MIT. Two and a half years.

It made her smile ruefully to remember her naïvety. She’d had no idea that her whole life was about to fall apart; there was sugar in the fuel tank already. It was just a matter of time. She had also been unaware that, as she was discovering a passion for machinery, he had been embarking on a career too, albeit with less enthusiasm for the path in front of him. That’s what he was reading about now.

**Then there’s the work to which I was born, the thrill act. My grandfather, my father and I have all ridden the Wall of Death. It’s a wooden trash can that we ride a vintage Indian Scout motorcycle around inside, faster and faster until we can ascend the banked side to race around the vertical wall of the cylinder. Once you get up to thirty five miles an hour you’re pulling about 5G. The G force is good, it sticks you to the wall, but if you get too much the blood centrifuges away from your brain to pool in your feet and you black out. Your sight goes first though to give you fair warning. So I have to reach a speed where I can just about handle the G’s without going blind and then do some tricks to excite the rubes. In many ways it’s the same as my other work, this work. What everyone is really looking for is a story. In the silo they want one involving my death or maiming in an explosion and a twist of tangled metal. I’m not that committed to the show so I’ll fake some incompetence and then clamber all over the bike like a monkey.**

One year she only saw him at a distance, in a tangled knot of other carney kids, wrestling, passing a cigarette back and forth. He had gotten tall. She didn’t approach, didn’t trust herself to get too near. At the end of sophomore year she didn't want to risk seeing him. It was too confusing, so she decided to skip the carnival. She felt guilty that she thought of Jug at night, alone in her room, imagined his gawky, slim limbed figure climbing in through her bedroom window, poised above her, saying …things, when she didn’t imagine Archie in that way, not ever. She was afraid to see him and be forced to confront the fact that she didn’t want her loyal, patient boyfriend but did want the difficult, confusing carney boy who’d clearly outgrown her. Despite her caution it seemed that she couldn’t escape him. She’d arranged to go to Pop’s with Archie on carnival night to eat burgers and talk about his plans for the summer, writing songs and ripping out dry wall for his dad. When they arrived there was a shock in store. Hanging around outside, wolf whistling at passing girls and yelling obscenities at everyone else, was a crowd of the carney youths. He was there, seeming to have shot up another foot in height. She stared at him. His hair was the same, tousled, black as a raven, and yet now it made her heart constrict in her chest. Something about his shape, the long legs and slim hips, the slouching stance made her breath short and laboured. With a start she realised that she wanted him. It was the lust that had been noticeably absent from her relationship with Archie. They’d talked about it. She’d said that she thought maybe she was maturing a little slower than other girls. That wasn’t true. If she could have had Jughead she was ready now, this minute. His leather jacket and the rolled cuffs on his jeans gave him a Marlon Brando vibe and he was leaning against a motorcycle in a proprietorial way, one foot resting against the air filter in a way that would do it no good. She’d be ok as long as he didn’t turn his basilisk eyes on her. If he did that all would be lost. She stopped in her tracks and turned to Archie, “I see someone I know Arch. Can we do something else maybe? The Bijou?”

Archie looked at the carney kids angrily, putting a comforting arm around her shoulders, wondering who had upset her. Archie was her boyfriend and yet his arm around her made her feel ashamed, like it was a betrayal of Jughead, or of herself perhaps. She wanted to shake it off and tears flooded her eyes at the realisation that she’d rather be hurt by Jughead than comforted by dear, loyal Archie who’d done nothing wrong and who, it seemed, she would never be in love with. And then he turned and saw her. She looked into his eyes for a moment before wrenching her gaze away. She got only as far as his mouth, fallen open in a surprised exhalation of emotion as he took her in, dressed for a date, her boyfriend’s protective arm around her shoulders. He nodded as if to indicate that he had been proven right about something. She felt sure there was pain in his eyes too even though he’d chosen this. She mustn’t let herself go to him so she turned on her heel and walked away, Archie jogging alongside her. She looked back just once to find him staring after her, raising his index finger to his eyebrow in a small salute, as if to an ex comrade.

By junior year things had changed. Her life had become so deeply joyless in the previous twelve months that she decided she had a right to have some fun. Besides she was growing up, putting aside her childish fantasies, as well as the not so childish ones. Her life was different now and she’d had to face some hard truths. There was no college fund, no easy path smoothed for her by parental indulgence. She would have to get a full ride if she were to go to college and if that didn’t happen she would have to stay in Riverdale, probably marry Archie, spend her life doing the books for the construction business and raising red haired children. Dreaming of anything else was futile. So given that that was what lay ahead she would go the carnival and douse herself in sugar and adrenaline and enjoy the thrills while she could. Jughead Jones wasn’t going to stop her. They went on the Gravitron and the Orbiter but then Kevin begged for something less challenging to his stomach. Archie led them towards the Wall of Death. He paused noticing something in her reaction that indicated a lack of enthusiasm. She shook her head and smiled brightly. “No, it’s fine. I don’t care what we see.”

There was a knot of carney folk around the pay booth, seemingly involved in a heated argument with a crowd of townies. Someone was yelling about refunds and it looked certain that at any moment there would be a pitched battle. Over the hubbub there was the roar of an engine and Jughead appeared on the motorcycle she had seen last year. Despite all her resolve her body responded to him just as it had to the orbiter, pulse thumping in her throat, stomach clenching, knees wobbling, sweat on her top lip, hair standing at the back of her neck. She tried to get herself back under control. He looked around at the gathered crowd and she heard him say “What, again?”. His voice was lower than she remembered. 

He stepped off his bike and into the trailer, appearing again pulling on the red white and blue leather jacket that was illustrated on the show’s art work. He began to drag a smaller bike from the side of the attraction and told a girl with braids to start letting the crowd up. She remembered the girl from somewhere and felt instantly jealous. An older man appeared and Betty could hear his words, now the agitated mob was concentrating on filing up the steps. “Jug, he made me promise not to let you do it again. It’s not what he wants for you. I gave him my word.”

“Yeah, well it’s pretty clear that he’s not too concerned about anyone keeping promises is he Thomas? And unless you want to burn the lot we’re going to have to give the rubes a show. Let’s at least hope he checked the bike before he crawled into a bottle.”

The older man clapped him on his back, as he pushed the bike into the drum of the show, yelling at his retreating back, “Forget that goddamn reverse though Jug. Your pop says it’s too risky, leave it alone.”

Archie had paid for their tickets and they joined about 250 other marks looking down into a wooden slatted drum from a walkway with only the flimsiest separation between the riding surface and the crowd. She felt like she was looking down into a snake pit. There was nothing to prevent the bikes from flipping over the top of the wall and plummeting through the spectators and onto the ground feet below. Almost immediately Jughead appeared with the bike at the bottom of the silo. He held out his arms for applause but couldn’t look less interested in whether it came or not. He certainly wasn’t giving any kind of spiel, throwing his long leg over a bike that looked like an antique. Betty remembered how she knew the girl with the braids who joined him inside. When she was twelve Polly had taken her to the carnival but promptly blew her off to be with her friends, unencumbered by irritating kid sisters. Betty had grinned to herself and tracked down Jughead selling cotton candy at a sugar shack. He’d clearly liked that better than the fun slide, the consumption of pure sucrose a literal and metaphorical sweetener to the work. He’d smiled shyly and made her a stick with a cloud of pink sugar as big as her head, calling to the girl with braids who was working at another stand, to take over for a few minutes. They’d sat behind the booth amongst the trash and garbage cans, swatting away flies and talking about books. She told him about school and he told her about the other carney kids and the fights with townies that seemed to erupt in every new location. She was reluctant to take her leave but she had to meet Polly and the girl was yelling at him to do his own damn work so she kissed his cheek and said goodbye and he blushed as pink as the cotton candy.

The braids were pink now but the girl seemed barely taller than when she had taken over the cotton candy machine. Her voice belied her tiny stature. “Ladies and Gentlemen, for your distraction and entertainment FP Jones the third will risk life and limb attempting to conquer the terrifying wall of death. It was in this very dome that his grandfather lost his life, his blood stains these boards.” She gestured vaguely but the drum was unstained by blood as far as Betty could see, to her relief. “Now the grandson takes the risks that will thrill and astound you. Prepare to be amazed by his courage and skill. She held out a helmet to him which, in a clearly rehearsed move, he waved away, kicked the bike into life and rode around the drum, gaining height as his speed increased. 

Soon he was riding around the midline of the silo, completely horizontal, gaining speed, faster and faster. Suddenly he twitched the handlebars and rode up to the lip of the drum then back down as the crowd yelled and whooped, clearly hoping for a maiming. He rode like that, recklessly, for a few minutes and then resumed a position on the mid line. He took both hands from the handlebars and crossed them over his chest to screams from above the edge of the tank. Then he propped one booted foot on the handlebars, seeming to relax backwards in a slouch. The other foot joined it and Betty’s heart was in her mouth. Then he twisted sideways to ride on the side of the saddle, staring defiantly at the crowd. Any other performer would have grinned and posed at this point but Jughead scowled, his face clearly showing the effect of the g force at work. Betty very much wanted the act to be over but Jughead then slowly, nonchalantly, took off the leather jacket and threw it to the girl still standing at the bottom of the drum. He put his legs back astride the bike, swooped down, making the crowd gasp as they thought he was sure to run her over. Instead he reached out a long arm, swept her off her feet and sat her in his lap. Betty’s feelings were becoming ever more complicated. The girl laughed and wriggled onto the handlebars arms outstretched, smiling broadly. They circled the drum several times, Jughead repeating the twitching of the bars that brought them close to the lip. People had begun to hold out bills over the lip of the drum and the girl smiled and reached for them as he took the bike’s wheel almost over the edge., When she had collected a handful of notes she’d stuff them into her bra with a cheeky wink and reach out for more. She wriggled back to his lap and then got to her feet, standing at the front of the saddle, arms outstretched and smiling flirtatiously before clambering back to sit on the handlebars again.

Jughead yelled something that wiped the smile from the girl’s face, made her shake her head. He seemed, for the first time, to be enjoying his work as he dipped the bike to the centre of the ring, grabbing her round the waist and depositing her on her feet before ascending again. He grabbed the hem of his ragged shirt and pulled it up over his face before weaving around the drum in a terrifying blind ellipse, edging the front tire to the lip of the drum. The high school girls gasped at the sight of olive skin over taut, slim muscle and then began to hoot and scream. Betty was transfixed by a dark line of hair that began at his navel and disappeared below the waist band of his jeans. She’d never felt as turned on as she did at that moment and that realisation made her blush with shame and guilt. The girl in the centre began to yell over the roar of the engine, “Now, ladies and gentlemen, Jughead Jones will attempt the stunt that took his grandfather’s life, the stunt that broke his father’s leg just two summers ago at the Indiana State Fair, the stunt that we have begged him not to attempt but which he is still going to try because he is too damn stubborn to listen to anyone with a lick of sense.” Jughead pulled the hem of his shirt back from its use as a makeshift blindfold and glared at the girl’s extemporisation. “He will attempt the full reverse. Ladies, Gentlemen you may want to take your children out of the show at this point so they don’t have too see Jones being turned into a nasty mess all over this nice clean attraction.” He glared at her again and sat sideways on the saddle with no apparent difficulty. Then he dragged first one long leg then the other to the back of the bike until he was facing the wrong direction, at which point he fist bumped the air and rode that way for several laps, seeming to deliberately wobble the bike a few times to frighten the more nervous patrons. Then he grinned to himself while still ignoring the crowd and turned back round, blanking the cheers that erupted. He slowed, returned to the level base of the silo, hopped off the bike and strode away, not even bowing in acknowledgment of the applause that he left behind.

The show had more of a physical effect on her than any of the thrill rides; it had been a kind of erotic Tilt-A-Whirl that left her breathless. She was conflicted. Her Jughead, her sensitive thoughtful boy who hated the carnival seemed to be trapped in this wooden drum, performing like a caged animal. She hated it but she couldn’t deny the effect that it had on her body. She could have watched him ride the wall forever but she never wanted him to ride it again. She had a feeling that it wasn’t just physical courage, that he seemed to possess in dangerous amounts, that scared and excited her but also his total disregard for his own life and future. It was leading him to take stupid risks. The crowd had dispersed and Archie was leading her away by her elbow, looking concerned at how pale she had become. As they walked down the steps she heard a voice, low and sarcastic, behind her. “Did you enjoy the show?”

She turned on her heel and hit him across the chest, feeling the dampness of his perspiration through the soft fabric of his T shirt. “You mustn’t take risks with your life Jughead.”

“You were paying for me to though Betty. Can’t disappoint all you mooches.” He smiled in a way that didn’t reach his eyes which looked sad and humiliated, their vibrancy somehow clouded. He stalked off to a trailer outside which a woman who appeared to be in her thirties was lurking. Betty had seen her in the crowd a few minutes before and now she stepped forward and placed her hand on his chest where Betty had struck him moments ago. She leaned in and said something to him, giggling and shaking her hair, and he glanced back at Betty before shrugging at the woman and leading her into the trailer. Betty felt like she had on the roller skate Christmas Day but a hundred times worse.

“God Betty, a stunt rider and a gigolo. How the hell do you know him?” Kevin asked, his eyes round with a mixture of surprise and grudging admiration. Archie was standing a little apart looking utterly miserable.

“I don’t know him Kev. I thought he was someone else,” Betty said, reaching for Archie’s hand, all enthusiasm for the carnival fermenting in her stomach like rancid funnel cake. They went home soon afterwards and she lay in her bed in her childhood home, which was no longer that place of security that it had once been, staring at the pink wallpaper, certain that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Part of her was saying that she was simply concerned that he was ruining his life, wasting his talents, gambling with his safety but another, more honest, part acknowledged that she’d wanted him so badly that she didn’t know how to process her feelings and her lust had curdled into rage, sexual jealousy masquerading as concern.


	3. Raw, Whining Power

**Let’s talk about the carnival of your imagination. I mean the magical wardrobe door that opens in your mind when someone says “Hey, a carnival. Let’s go!” It’s evening, right? Maybe seven-ish or a little later. The sky is a darker blue now, a few clouds possibly. It’s been a hot one and that heat lingers in the ground, releasing once the sun’s gone down. The air is thick, almost meaty, once you step onto the midway, grease and sweat, oil and cheap mall perfume blending together. It’s a cacophonous place isn’t it? There’s the music of course. It’s mostly pop songs from twenty years ago playing with the bass up too high from cheap loudspeakers that distort the sound until it seems to be playing from some twisted alternative dimension, song merging into song as you move along the alleyways “…got me looking so crazy right now, your love’s got me I say don't you know you say you don't know I say, take me out baby don't mess around because she loves me so this I know fo….” Then there are those yelps and screams floating down from the thrill rides, someone yelling in what sounds like agony from an orbiter way up there. There’s a grunt and a thud as some guy in a tank top smashes a huge hammer onto the base of the hi striker. The bell rings at the top and a girl throws her arms around his beefy neck in some sort of erotic paroxysm. He’s a shill by the way, and so’s she. The inside man who runs the hi striker has loosened the mechanism to allow him to strike the bell, when you pay for your turn it’ll be tightened back up, the less he likes you the tighter it’ll be. You’re never going to ring that bell, or hers for that matter. Soon your teeth are furry with the cinnamon sugar from the funnel cake and there’s a sticky blue stain on your shirt from an interminable Icee. You know you’ll regret the corndog but if feels practically obligatory. “If not now, then when?” you ask the offal as it colonises your arteries. A talker outside an attraction, is building the tip, that’s you you know, you’re the tip. So the talker will give you a spiel that hypnotises your sugar addled brain to pay the price of admission and you’ll troupe in like a sheep to the shearer, to be fleeced.**

She knew that he meant the carnival as it had existed in her mind before she had learned the realities of the carney life. He used to think that she believed it to be some sort of paradise and had tried to protect her from disappointment but she had always longed for the grime, the gleeful honesty of the con, the fear and lust and avarice that lay right on the surface, never hidden. He’d had a romantic idea of the suburban life she’d lived. That was a fantasy too.

With entertaining synchronicity her high school graduation was the middle of the week the carnival was in town and the graduating class had made the decision to attend after their caps had been thrown in the air and before the Blossom rager. Betty was about to say goodbye to everyone she knew as they made their way off to colleges far and near and she agreed to tag along. Her silly heart would be safe enough she assured herself. For today, she vowed, she would be a graduating senior and have a good time. 

Archie had broken up with her just before senior prom for reasons she completely understood, hell she agreed with them, but it had made a lot of the graduating class think he was a rat. Anyway it meant that she was a single girl out for a good time so she drank a shot with Kevin before the graduation ceremony and giggled and agreed when Reggie insisted she take a swig of something pretty noxious from his flask in the car before they got to the midway. It made her a little giddy and she agreed to ride the Kamikaze. Being flung in stomach churning arcs by those penduluming arms made her light headed with adrenaline so she ignored her own advice and didn’t stay clear of the Wall of Death. When Kevin asked her what she wanted to see next she said “I’m a single woman so … Jughead Jones’ chest please Kevin,” and snickered like an insane person, leading him toward the silo. 

They got to the attraction just as the show was beginning. The posters had changed to show two riders in the drum instead of one. Father and son were riding together now apparently. As the audience trooped up the steps she saw Jughead collecting his bike from a concrete plinth and wheeling it into the arena followed by an older man with five o clock shadow and a slightly crumpled look. As she watched she saw, quite clearly, a patch of fresh oil under the older man’s bike as he pushed it away. She knew enough about the physics of the act to grasp that an oil leak could be fatal. Oil on the planks of the drum could cause a wheel to slip and one falling rider would inevitably lead to riders and machines tumbling round inside the drum like a gory spin cycle. The adrenaline and booze buzz drained from her as if she had been shoved under an icy shower. She pushed her way back down the steps, abandoning Kev, and yelled, “Jughead, Jughead! Stop! Wait!” He glanced back at her, huffed impatiently and went to continue into the drum but she yelled again, “Jughead. Please!” and he turned, muttered something to his father and walked over. She pointed at the oil stain on the concrete, kneeling to rub her hand over it to show the wet slickness on her fingers. His eyes widened.

“Shit, thanks Betty. Christ, he knows to check it.” He looked mad. “Dad, dad, bring the bike over here.”

“It’s a Scout right?” She asked. “It’s likely the oil pan gasket. It’s an easy fix. You want me to have a look real quick?”

He looked at her, surprised. “No, it’s fine. OK, thanks Betty.” His dad joined them looking from one to the other in confusion and Betty leaned down to check the gasket, bringing her fingers away stained with more oil. The older man’s face paled as he realised the danger that he had placed both himself and his son in. 

He recovered himself quickly and looked inquisitively at the girl who had possibly just saved his life. “Hell thanks girly. Observant ain’t she Jug? We oughta say thanks properly.” He must have caught something in the way her eyes flashed towards Jughead because he grinned, a calculating expression appearing on his face. “Hey after the show Jug’ll take you for a milkshake, right? Vanilla’s always been your favourite hasn’t it Jug?” He winked at his son who muttered an obscenity under his breath. She had no idea if he was referring to the milkshake or to her with the vanilla comment but before Jug could add any comment to the shake of the head that he was already giving she interjected, surprised by her own words.

“No, thanks Mr Jones. I’m not twelve years old. I’d like a job please.”

“Honey, the jump is in two days. We won’t be here long enough for that.”

“I mean I want to come with you. I’m a good mechanic. Let me fix that gasket for you, you’ll see. I can learn other machines. I’ve stripped and rebuilt anything I could get my hands on.”

“Ah girl, I wouldn’t do it to your folks. The road’s no place for a young woman,” he replied, shaking his head.

Betty gave an exasperated laugh. “My dad’s shacked up with a floozy and won’t return my calls. My mom has run off with a cult and I’ll be homeless in less than a week. My boyfriend dumped me. The road is a better option than anywhere else I can go. I can be useful here. Give me a month, a week, whatever. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll work for my board until you agree I’m worth more.” Jughead was staring at her in alarm and disbelief but his dad seemed to take her story in his stride.

“You fix that gasket and I’ll think about it.” He was laughing at her eagerness as he put an arm behind her back and motioned her toward another trailer where she found a mismatched set of tools and spares as well as a reserve bike that he wheeled out to use in the act. 

Jughead, standing apparently dumbstruck where they had left him, began to call after them, “What the hell dad? We can’t pay our own way, we can’t feed a green girl too. Where the hell is she going to sleep? Christ don’t even answer that! There’s no way you’re going to… What the fuck?”

“Don’t mind him,” his dad said, “he’s a little up tight. He’ll come round. You got what you need?”

Betty nodded and set to work at once. Her repair was almost finished by the time the act was over. Jughead wheeled his bike into the trailer and stared at her, a challenge in his eyes. “Not everything’s about you Jughead,” she said. “I need a job, you clearly need a mechanic. I can learn a lot here. I’ll stay out of your way since I’m so offensive to you.”

“Fuck Betty, it wasn’t about that. It’s just no life at all for you.”

“Maybe it’s no life for you Jughead. It’s what I want and I get to choose for myself. You’re not my boyfriend or my father and, since they have no interest in what I do, fuck them, and fuck you too. Now get lost and let me get on with my work.”

“You tell him girl,” Mr Jones said as he approached. “Well that’s a neat job.”

“It’s a temporary fix. It’ll hold for a couple of days but I’d want to strip it down, get that sump off and clean it all, put in a new gasket. Maybe check the others before putting it back together. I could do it in less than a day.”

“OK, Thomas says you can bunk with him and his granddaughter for a week. We’ll see if we can use you after that. If not you’ll have to find your own way home. Deal?”

“Deal, thanks sir.”

“I’m FP. Ain’t no-one here you need to call sir.” As they walked away she heard Jughead protesting. FP replied “She’s a forty miler boy. She’ll be gone long before we get to Harrington. And all the bikes need stripping down, my eyesight’s gone to shit and as a mechanic you’re a hell of a poet. Now shut up your whining.”

Betty finished up the repair and when she stood, wiping her hands with a dirty towel, she found the girl with the pink braids behind her, watching, waiting patiently. “I’m Toni. My gramps says you’re to bed down in our trailer. You’ll have to share with me. That OK?”

“Yes, thanks so much. I’ll get things sorted out at home tonight and bring my stuff over in the morning.”

“Are you doing this for him? For Jughead? Because I’m warning you, he’s stubborn. If he told you no, he meant it. You’d do better to stay home and have a nice apple pie life here instead of chasing after him with your tongue hanging out.”

Betty felt the blush rise on her cheeks. “Did he send you to put me off? I told him it’s nothing to do with him. I need somewhere to be and I want to be useful. They need a competent mechanic if the state of these bikes is anything to judge by.”

Suddenly Jughead was back in the trailer, shoving past Toni to look into her eyes. “What’s this about Elizabeth? What’s it to you if a couple of carneys live or die? Why would you throw away your life on this?”

She was pretty mad now, the anger clearing a path through the lust so that she could fight back against him. She wasn’t going to let him ruin this chance for her. “Well you need to get this narrative straight in your head. You used to read didn’t you? What’s my character arc? Am I some sort of princess who’s throwing away her kingdom to pursue the peasant boy? Because, let me tell you, that’s not what’s happening. Or am I doing this just to irritate you? Because, hard as it may be to believe, my world doesn’t revolve around you. At the moment it seems like you’re a helluva lot more bothered by me that I am by you.”

Toni was laughing quietly. “Well Jones, she’s not going to be told and she’s certainly not scared of you. Maybe dial back the machismo. It doesn’t sit right on you anyway.”

“Well thanks for the goddamn support Toni. I’m trying to stop a girl ruining her life here. You could give a little help,” he hissed, eyes flashing.

“Hey Jones, she’s a young woman not a child. It’s her life. It doesn’t seem to me that she’s going to be pining too much or cramping your style and if she’s as good a mechanic as she thinks she is she’ll be useful. Lay off and find someone else to bully.” Betty smiled at Toni who put an arm around her shoulders, “Stick with me newbie. I won’t let them haze you too hard.”

They actually did haze her pretty hard despite Toni’s assurance. Once she’d gone home and slept uneasily for a few hours, she packed a bag, left a cowardly note for Archie rather than talking to him and went back to the carnival and got to work. Every few minutes someone else would stop in to look her over, often suggesting fool’s errands for her. She wasn’t going to fall for being sent to get a cordless extension cable or a long weight but they did get her a few times. The one that made them laugh the most was when FP sent her all the way to the other side of the lot to see the agent of a grab joint, which he explained was a food stall when she admitted her ignorance, to fetch the key to the midway. When she found the agent he chuckled and asked if she was a green hire and she admitted she was new but said that she was staying. He sent her back to FP to say he’d only let her have the key if FP would give him the lightbulb grease he owed him and it wasn’t until she was halfway back that she realised she’d been had. She went back to her work and no-one said a word but everyone laughed whenever they saw her for a couple of days. Even Jughead cracked a smile at that. She wished it didn’t make her go weak at the knees.

She stripped both the main bikes before the jump and as soon as they got to Harrington, while the motordrome was being put up, she reorganised the tools and spares and made a list of essentials that they needed to lay in if she was to maintain things in good order. She worked neatly and with complete focus and she could tell that FP was impressed. She was sharing a sleeping space with Toni that was the size of her closet back home but it was neat and convenient and she felt adventurous and proud of her own courage. 

She found that as a newbie she was required to turn her hand to anything and everything as need dictated. She helped with the set up of the kiddy train and fixed the electrics and motors on a variety of fryers, popcorn poppers and cotton candy makers as well as the nightmarish complexity of a dippin’ dots machine. Some of the work was dirty, some of it was frustrating, bodging parts from different machines together, the dippin’ dots gizmo was lethal, burning her no matter how careful she was. She enjoyed all of it. She was under a Tilt A Whirl one afternoon, swearing softly as engine oil fell into her eyes, trying to ease a stubborn bolt, when she felt a hand spidering up her leg. She flinched, banging her head and yelling before shuffling out to stare furiously into the eyes of the tall young man who had once teased Jughead about her. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He laughed and reached out to grab her again when Jughead appeared, murderous rage on his face. 

“Sweetpea, leave her alone man. You don’t touch her.” His reaction made her almost more angry than the original offence. 

She turned on him. “You need to back off. I’m handling this. It has precisely nothing to do with you.” She turned back to the other young man, Sweetpea apparently. “You’re a creep and you’re totally out of line. You deserve a slap but I’m holding a wrench right now and I don’t trust myself. Do it again and you’ll feel the business end of this thing around your teeth. Capiche?” Jughead was still staring at her. “What?” she yelled, her fury transferring to him.

“You’re bleeding. You banged your head. And there’s grease on your face,” he muttered.

“Fine. You told me. Just keep out of my way and I’ll keep out of yours.”

He glared at her, “Fine.” Then he mockingly circled his wrist twice and performed an elaborate courtly bow over it. “I do desire we may be better strangers,” he said as he straightened and turned away.

She stared at his retreating back and yelled, “Is that Shakespeare? Did you just quote Shakespeare at me?”

“What if I did? Did you think I’d forgotten how to read?” And he was gone. He seemed to leave a Jughead shaped absence long after he had disappeared. It was a talent.

**Your carnival is always going to be different from mine. For you the midway appears like a mushroom circle overnight, something alien and incongruous intruding on a familiar location. For me it’s the same place in a hundred different places. It’s a townscape where the backcloth changes but the buildings remain the same. And the villagers are my compatriots. Some of them are good folks, some of them are mean and crooked but, when it comes down to it, they’ll be for me and I’ll be for them. Some of them are a little strange because human flotsam and jetsam tends to pitch up against the rocks of the carnival eventually. If you’ve just got out of jail or been thrown out of home it’s hard to get a start anywhere but you can get somewhere dry to sleep, a meal and a job with us. So we attract the misfits, the women who won’t submit, the men who can’t swallow the insults of a boss with no sense, the petty and not so petty criminals. Call us out on it and we’ll laugh and agree but lay a hand on any of us and we’ll fight back, all of us at once and as dirty as you can imagine. My carnival is a filthy, smelly, vomit splattered latrine of a place but, if you’re with it and on it, you’ll have a home there.**

They’d been in Harrington for almost a week when Archie showed up. Her note had said she was leaving town for a fresh start but he’d put two and two together and followed the carnival all the way to Delaware. She was taking a break with a cup of stewed coffee before starting to strip down and rebuild the spare bike when Toni came to warn her. “Some red headed clem is looking for you, Ponytail. Trouble?”

“My ex. I don’t know what he wants. We broke up. Where is he?” She set off in the direction that Toni indicated and soon found Archie looking deeply uncomfortable and out of place amongst a group of her new colleagues. “What’s up Arch?” she asked breezily as he turned to her, confusion all over his face. 

“Betty, I’ve come to bring you home. You can’t be here. Get your stuff.” He looked around as though he expected someone to try to hold onto her by force.

“Thanks for caring Archie. I’m fine. I’m not leaving,” she smiled to show that she wasn’t mad at him for taking the trouble to come for her even though she had never asked him to.

“What the hell Betty? You don’t know these people. It’s not safe.” He was trying to be subtle, keeping his voice low. She was beginning to feel a little irritated that he thought she’d just go with him, reverse a decision that she’d made about her own life. Then he made it worse. “Look I guess you’re upset about us but come home and we’ll talk about it. Maybe we can work it out. Are you trying to make a point? God, you can move in with me and my dad if that’s what you need.”

“Christ why do men think everything is about them? I’m not mad about that. You were right. I don’t love you like that. We shouldn’t have been more than friends. It was a mistake that I made because I was scared. I’m not scared anymore. I want to be here. You go on home now. Thanks for coming.” 

He reached out and grabbed her wrist and started to pull. “Come on. You’re being dumb. Let’s go home.” He was much stronger than her and his tugging was dragging her across the dirt. 

She looked around and saw Jughead, watching, arms folded across his chest. “Oh for God’s sake! Ok Jughead. Now I guess you can help.”

“Oh, **now** I can help. Thanks so much. Maybe I’m inclined to let him carry you off? Ok, Ok.” He saw the outrage on her face and stepped forward, blocking Archie’s way. “Right pal. You heard her. She wants to stay. I understand you think you know best, you probably do, but you don’t drag people about like that, under any circumstances.” Archie was so shocked that he let go of her wrist and she moved to the other side of Jughead and he put an arm around her shoulders in a protective way that she tolerated since it made Archie’s eyes widen in shock and she calculated that he might give up sooner if he thought she’d moved on. “Now we can fight over it like cavemen but you’re outnumbered and we don’t fight fair so I’d say let it go. No harm no foul. She’ll write you. She’s good at that.” He took a step forward into Archie’s personal space to make the most of his height advantage and Sweetpea and some of the other carneys including Toni and Thomas advanced to stand by him. Betty felt so grateful to them that she almost wept but she was anxious that no-one should hurt Archie so she reached out to him and put her hand on his arm. 

“Archie, you have to let me have this. Please? If I’m in trouble I’ll call you. I promise.” He was madder than she had ever seen him and he turned on his heel.

“Don’t bother Betty. Get your new friends to help you,” he called over his shoulder as he walked away. Jughead immediately removed his arm from her shoulder and stepped away from her. She missed the weight of that arm. He tilted his chin in acknowledgement of her muttered thanks and looked at her curiously. 

“What the hell’s going on Betty? What happened to you?”

She shrugged. “It’s a long and miserable tale of woe. I’m sure you’ve got better things to do.”

“Hey, it’s still me. You know I’m a sucker for a story. Tell me what happened.”

So she told him.

She’d been working in the garage one Saturday morning when she heard a fight sweeping through the house like a tornado. The Coopers didn’t fight. Her mom issued diktats and they all fell into line. That didn’t happen on this occasion. It began in Polly’s room, her mother screaming and crying as if she didn’t care what the neighbours thought. She heard her running down the stairs, out of control. It scared her because her mother was the most controlled person she knew. She heard Polly’s voice yelling, “It’s going to be fine Momma. Jason is standing by me. We’re going to get married. It’s going to be OK.” Betty’s stomach sank. Polly had a gastric flu a month ago. She’d warned her that her birth control wouldn’t work. She’d learned that in health class. Polly just laughed and called her a worry wart. 

Alice was screaming for her husband and she heard Hal slowly emerge from the basement where he had been fiddling with the furnace. She heard the low rumble of his voice but as he understood the situation he spoke louder and louder. Betty was shocked; her father never yelled. “And what about Berkeley? Isn’t he going to Berkeley? And Northwestern. That’s finished is it?”

Polly was crying now. “I’m going to California with JJ. We’ll get married accommodation. It’s fine. He’ll take care of me.”

Hal’s response to that was even more chilling. “And that’s how you get us isn’t it? Smith women and Blossom men. You get your claws in and that’s it. Well I hope Jason thinks his moment of fun was worth it. I tell you for nothing, mine certainly wasn’t. He’ll never forgive you Polly. You get what you want but he’ll never love you. Or the baby. Think on that.”

Then Alice was yelling too. “That’s right Hal. Blame me. All my fault. Nothing to do with you not being able to take some responsibility. I was the one that had the baby, that had to hand him over when he was just born, when he needed me so much. Not you. You weren’t even there. Me, alone, eighteen and terrified. Where the hell were you?”

Hal replied, “Go to hell Alice, you and your daughters. I can’t watch you ruin another young man’s life. I’ve had enough.” His heavy footsteps stomped up the stairs, she heard the banging of drawers and her stomach tied itself in knots. Polly seemed to have pulled the whole edifice of the Cooper family down around their ears. She’d known it was held together with sticky tape and pretence but for it to implode like that had seemed unthinkable. He didn’t even look at Betty, pale faced and shaking at the garage workbench, when he got in his car and peeled away from Elm Street.

“I call him sometimes,” she said, looking at Jughead sitting next to her on the platform that led to the Ferris wheel. “At first there was always music and young women giggling in the background. He couldn’t wait to get me off the line. I found out where he was living and went round there. I needed his help but he just acted like I was nothing to him. He gave me a couple hundred bucks. He didn’t want me there, couldn’t wait for me to leave. When I was going he said I should call first next time. I guess so he could put me off or go out. It’s like he was only ever pretending to love me. I thought I was his favourite but I guess I was just easier to fool. Last I heard he was living over in Centerville with a woman who’s got a couple of young sons. Going for a do-over I suppose.”

She told him how her mom had started drinking Bloody Marys right after breakfast and vodka tonics after lunch. He put a hand on her arm in solidarity with her experience. Betty explained that when her mom stopped shopping for groceries, didn’t bother with the laundry, let dust accumulate on her cherished furniture she could see she wasn’t coping. She’d tried to pick up the slack but it was more than she could manage alone. She’d started to rely on Archie too much. She knew he was unhappy but he was too decent to break up with her when her life was in such a mess. Even so she could see the trapped look in his eyes and imagined that it was the one her dad had in his when her mom had told him she was pregnant at seventeen.

“You remember that night I saw you at Pop’s?” He nodded, wincing slightly at the memory. It really had hurt him then. “When I got home Polly was going crazy.” Eventually she’d managed to ascertain that she’d made plans to leave town with Jason to go to friends of his who had started a commune off grid, upstate, both of them desperate to escape the family interference and reproaches. She’d taken her suitcase and her newly showing pregnancy, waiting and waiting, but he never came. He didn’t answer her calls, his parents said they had no idea where he was. Their mother was trying to get her to understand that she had been abandoned, to persuade her to give up the baby for adoption and start at Northwestern later in the year but Polly kept saying that something awful had happened. She could feel it, the baby could feel it. She was accusing her mother of wanting Jason dead, of wanting her baby dead.

Jason didn’t reappear and Polly called the commune and retreated there to have her child. Alice, further rejected, hit the bottle even harder and Hal was simply absent, opting out of the whole sorry mess. Betty should have been working on her college applications but instead she was helping her mother into bed and worrying about how to pay the bills that seemed to keep arriving in the mail. 

“Anyway my sister had twins. She’d managed to be more pregnant than other girls, always the over achiever. My mom started going to visit her at the commune which at least seemed to stop her drinking. She made friends there instead of just intimidating people which had been her normal way to behave. Eventually she stopped coming home completely. I was studying, and taking apart and rebuilding every piece of mechanical equipment I could lay hands on. Washing machines, blenders, a Chevelle that a guy in my class paid me $100 dollars to strip and rebuild. Then my mom stopped coming home and my dad wouldn’t answer my calls. I had to take a job in the shop at a dealership to pay the bills. Bye bye extra curriculars and AP classes, farewell to MIT applications. I was fixing dented bodywork out of hours when one of my mom’s old friends had dinged the SUV and didn’t want her husband to know or helping high schoolers fix up jalopies for a few dollars.”

Anyway, I graduated, just. My mom sold the house. No idea what happened to the money. I guess I thought I could rely on Archie but when I told him he just sat on the couch and looked awkward. I was kind of hoping he’d tell me what to do, make it alright. He said that he knew I didn’t really love him and that it would be wrong to move in together or something just because I was out of options.”

“Dick,” said Jughead.

“No, he was right. I didn’t love him. At least not how he deserves to be loved. He’s a songwriter you know,” Jughead huffed disparagingly and rolled his eyes. “No, he’s actually good. No-one would write songs about what we had. It was always much more a friendship. So he did me a favour, really. And I’m glad I’m here. So that’s the tale of woe. You asked for it!”

He didn’t say anything, just reached out and put an arm around her shoulder like one of those side hugs when they were little kids. She found that it was the most comforting thing she could imagine and she relaxed against his warm side, feeling like she was safe at last, no matter what happened.

**The border between my carnival and yours is a time not a place, usually it’s around midnight. The folks are different then. The kids are long gone, tucked up in bed with a plush that smells a little funky and a bellyache from too much fried dough. There are high schoolers drunk on something sweet and nauseating, hanging off each other in a haze of endorphins, adrenaline and lust, still searching for thrills but this time ones they create with each other’s fingers and tongues. Then there are the lot lice who’ve spent a whole lot of time and no money at the lot, still drifting. The carney kids will be reading the midway, wandering the alleyways looking for dropped coins and lost valuables. When there seems no prospect of adding to the take, the lights on the Ferris wheel will shut off signalling that the show is over for another night. The genny is shut down, leaving us carneys to drag ourselves to our beds or the G-top in total darkness, trying not to step in anything unmentionable, of which there is a great deal in all varieties. The G-Top is a convenience store, a bar, a food joint and a casino. The gambling is a sight to see, the cut and thrust of cons, evenly matched losing their season’s pay on the turn of a crooked card. It’s where the hard lessons are learned. You can’t kid a kidder but that’s just what you’ll have to do if you’re going to get out of there with the shirt on your back.**

Her carney life settled into a routine. Her mechanical skills were useful around the lot and began to draw a small but validating wage. The Old West knife throwing act suffered a setback when the semi clad assistant ran off with a sailor in Wilmington and Betty volunteered to take her place much to Toni’s disapproval at her willingness to be objectified. Finally she would get to be a lady in sequins although actually her costume was that of an old timey saloon girl in keeping with the act’s theme. She had ostrich feathers for her hair, a ruched dress and black lace gloves and she stood in front of a target while the knives whizzed past her ears. She cut a lock of her hair and concealed it in her dress so that at one point in the act she could drop it on the floor to pretend that Jim Bowie the thrower, otherwise known as Al, had accidentally knicked her and wave the hair angrily in his face. Later she suggested that she bend to pick up the lock from the floor and he throw directly where her head would have been if she hadn’t ducked a split second earlier. It always got a gasp from the audience that made her blood race with excitement.

She realised that she was happier than she had been in months, years perhaps and that she had no intention of leaving the carnival. When carneys accused her of being new or green she replied that she didn’t know the language yet but she was learning and she planned to be with it. She kept quiet, tried to learn, took jokes in good humour and rarely got in anyone’s way. 

Jughead had begun to relax and not actively avoid her. She was checking the bikes one afternoon before the first show when he turned up, leaning in the doorway of the trailer and asking her how she was doing. 

“Fine thanks. You?”

“Yeah, doing OK.” He seemed to want to talk but didn’t know how to start and she remembered those awkward ice breaking moments when they were kids. 

“Read any good books lately?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder and then returning to the bike, knowing that looking at him was likely to spook him like a nervous horse.

“Yeah, I guess. I like Kafka. You read any of that?’

“Um, yeah, The Castle. Maybe I didn’t really get it. Tell me why you like it.”

And he did. He talked about alienation, feeling excluded, that society was inexplicable and implacably opposed to him and his kind. She listened, occasionally asking questions, more interested in his response to the writing than the story itself. Eventually he stopped and looked embarrassed. “Sorry, I was just talking there. Boring. No-one here really reads much so…”

“Are you writing?” she asked, remembering that childhood confession.

“Nah, no point. This is it. I’m trapped like K. Can’t go forwards, can’t go backwards. That’s the thing with the carney life, we’re always moving but we’re always right here, in exactly the same place.”

“You could leave, get a straight job, you could go to college. You’re smart, maybe even get a scholarship.”

“I don’t have a high school diploma like you do Betty. You have options that I’d kill for. That’s why I didn’t want you to join up with us.”

“But you could get your GED. That, along with your reading would be enough I’m sure. I could help. I’d like to help.”

“And I’ll be in some library someplace and my dad’ll take a drink and there’ll be no-one to stop him riding. He’ll die. That’ll be on me. No, I’m fine. I can still read, I don’t need to go to college for that. One thing’s for sure though, I’ll never inflict this on a kid. I’ve been riding the wall since I was fifteen on and off. It ends with me.”

Over the next few weeks they talked about books pretty often. He had read everything and remembered it all. She wanted him to be able to escape almost as much as she wanted to stay. She wanted freedom for both of them but she wanted him too. Sometimes when he’d brought his bike back after the show and gone off to get food, leaving her alone in the sodium light of the workshop, she’d lay her hands on the handlebars, their skin separated by only a few minutes, the ghost of his touch almost within her grasp. She'd imagine his fingers were still there and close her eyes and imagine them reaching away from the metal to run, cool and gentle over her cheek. Then she’d shake her head at her silliness and check over the machines so that he would be safe tomorrow.


	4. Your Magnificent Silhouette

**While I’m pulling back the shabby velvet curtain on the carney life, let me tell you about the jump. That’s what we call the whole palaver of tearing down the rides and the booths and all the rest of our paraphenalia, loading it onto trucks, driving it through the sticky fingered dawn to the next lot, unloading it and building a city. Sometimes you get an uncomfortable night’s sleep somewhere in all of that, usually in the front of a truck with your jacket for a pillow, but pretty often you get a brutal circus jump where you do it all and then put on a show before you get to lay your head down. In the interests of not falling asleep and wrecking the truck, when the driver goes to the office for the gas money often their envelope includes the beans along with the notes. That’s what they call the stay awake pills that keep everyone wired enough to work eighteen hours, drive for six and then work another eighteen. So exhausted people, jacked up on speed, building the rides to which you trust your lives; I’m not putting you off am I?**

It was in October at the Georgia National Fair that things took a turn. She’d been rehearsing for the knife act and when she got back to the Wall of Death to check the bikes over, she found FP’s trailer door standing open and him sprawled on the couch. There was an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps on the floor next to him. She coaxed him to lay on his side and he began to tell her sentimentally that she was like a daughter to him, that she was a kind girl, that she deserved better than a carney life. He began to cry and she felt embarrassed for him so she put the bottle in the trash and closed the door. It looked like Jug would be riding alone tonight which meant that he’d feel obliged to do the dangerous reverse. 

She returned from having knives thrown at her head that evening, still in her cheap satin dress and garters to find FP up, dressed and, quite clearly, despite the fact that he was swaying, planning to ride. She looked over at Thomas who was working the ticket booth and made a bottle tipping gesture, nodding her head at FP. He came over and tried to steer the man back to the trailer. “Hey FP, Jug’s riding tonight. You got the night off fella. You have a good sleep now.” 

FP shrugged his hand off his shoulder and made some noise in response, turning to grab the handlebars of his bike. When Thomas tried again, FP whirled around aggressively and squared up to the old man as if to strike him. Betty launched herself forward but before she could get between then Jughead had appeared behind FP and put his hand on his shoulder.

“Go inside Dad. You aren’t riding tonight,” he said firmly. 

FP wheeled around, yelling, “Boy I’m not about to take orders from my own kid. I’m riding and that’s it.” He stumbled a little and pulled back his fist, another target in his sights now. Jug stepped back while FP’s fist flailed in the air, making no contact, then stepped forward and landed one decisive punch to his father’s jaw that sent him flat out onto the ground. Jug shook his hand and went to fetch his bike. He looked over his shoulder at Betty. 

“Can you clear that up please Betty? Make sure he doesn’t choke.” She nodded, understanding why he felt so trapped. 

Thomas helped her decant a muttering, cursing FP into the trailer and she sat on the kitchen chair watching him. She heard the whoops and cheers during the act, listened to the audience scream and knew he was doing the reverse, waited with her heart in her mouth until the eruption of applause that meant it was over, grasping something of his insecurity as kid. Listening to that every night, not knowing if your dad was alive or dead, would challenge anyone’s equanimity. He didn’t come back to the trailer. Eventually she heard the roar of his road bike’s engine and knew that he was going to ride off his anger. She stayed with FP, concerned that he had banged his head when he hit the ground or that he’d wake up and begin drinking again. He was conscious but talking nonsense and she wasn’t sure if it was booze or a head injury that was to blame. Eventually he woke up a little and she could see his eyes glint in the reflected lights from the Ferris wheel through the window. He rubbed his jaw. “Jug hit me did he?” She nodded. “He’s a good kid. He means well.”

“I know FP. Not really a kid anymore though.”

“No, I guess you’re right. You reckon I’m holding him back.”

“Well, what he does is his choice but I think maybe there are things he’d like for his life other than this.”

“Like you? He wants you.”

“I really don’t think he does, but anyway I didn’t mean that. I think he’d like to go to college, I think he’d like to write. But he feels trapped here, riding that drum, like a rat in a wheel. Maybe it’d be kind to let him go.”

“Hey I’m not stopping him writing. Look at this. He doesn’t know that I know about this.” FP wandered into another room, still none too steady on his feet, the trailer lurching with his lumbering movements. He rustled about and returned with a thick bundle of pages, closely typed on both sides, secured with book binding rings. “Jug’s book,” FP said proudly, handing it to her. He’d said he wasn’t writing but the date on the cover said that he’d finished it only six weeks earlier. FP was back on the couch smiling and clearly about to drift back to sleep. She knew that she shouldn’t read it, knew it was a terrible invasion of his privacy but it was here in her hands and she simply couldn’t resist taking a peek inside the mind of Jughead Jones.

She read for hours. The dawn was breaking by the time she set the manuscript down. She knew that her critical faculties were not on point when it came to him but she was sure that it was good, really good. It was dark, unsurprisingly, but she would have expected something with a cynical tone. Instead it was a story with real emotion. The protagonist was his own grandfather and the story explored the difference between a mythic character who died a heroic and tragic death in the carnival and an alternative story where he went out for a pack of smokes and never returned, leaving his son to risk his life in his turn to support his mother. The son inherited the silo but it trapped him, circling forever, riding the knife’s edge between death and tarnished glory. It was a story about a narrative web trapping struggling people like flies. She knew that it had to be published and she also knew that he would never make that happen.

She had no idea how long she had, but she grabbed her phone and set about photographing page after page. An hour later she was less than half way through, her battery was at four percent and she heard the roar of an engine outside. She gathered the pages and ran into the room from which FP had brought the manuscript. The single mattress was out of position on its metal frame. She pulled it further aside, her heart racing because the engine noise had stopped, and saw that there was a scrap of torn paper in the space between the springs. She placed the sheaf of pages back. As she did so, with a terrible judder she glimpsed another bundle further down on the springs, recognising her own childish handwriting. He still had her letters. She heard his boots on the step, no time to get back to the chair, so she toed off her shoes, pushed the mattress into place and lay down on it, pretending to be asleep even though her heart was thumping in her ears. 

She heard him step into the trailer and grunt when saw his dad asleep on the couch. Then as he stood in the bedroom doorway, he gave a little huff of surprise. He stepped towards her and it took everything she had not to open her eyes but she slowed her breathing and remained absolutely still. He reached down and tucked a loose strand of hair back from her face and then she felt the soft weight of a blanket being placed gently over her. It was the tenderest thing anyone had done for her in years. She remembered her mother’s hand stroking her back when she had the whooping cough. All at once it was a struggle to breathe because of the lump in her throat. Somehow she remained still until she realised that her unlocked phone was on the table in the other room. If he was as cavalier as she clearly was about privacy, he would see what she had done. She was under no illusions; it would come out eventually and he would never speak to her again, she was well aware of that. She would have destroyed their friendship but that was a deal she was willing to strike. If the book was published she would be giving him a life. He needed that more than he needed her.

Apparently he didn’t look at her phone and, after a few minutes, she smelled coffee brewing and wandered into the kitchen, making a performance of wiping her hand across her eyes sleepily. “Hey Jughead. Sorry about using your bed. I was worried about your dad so I stayed here. I got really tired. I just meant to close my eyes for a second. Where did you go? Been breaking hearts all over Georgia?”

He looked at her curiously. “Nah, that’s not my style at all. I rode about and then I found a twenty four hour diner. I like diners, the same everywhere like the carnival. I guess I was trying to work up the courage to take off and never come back, but here I am. There’s something I can’t leave behind.”

She wondered if he meant his dad or the manuscript and she nodded to show she understood. He handed her a cup of coffee and she clutched it to herself rather than touching him as she longed to. She sat back on the kitchen chair and he dragged over a stool and looked at her. “You were all ready to get in the middle of that last night weren’t you?”

She smiled and gestured at herself, still in her saloon girl costume. “Hey Jug, in case you hadn’t noticed, I get knives thrown at me for a living. Two old guys wailing on each other is nothing to me.” A laugh exploded from him; he always seemed surprised when she made him laugh. As they drank their coffee she finally got up the nerve to ask him why he’d stopped writing to her. He considered his answer and then seemed to resolve to be honest.

“We wrote to each other about Heathcliff once. Do you remember?” She did, she remembered everything he had written to her. His letters were tucked into the side pocket of the suitcase she’d brought with her. She reread them sometimes even though it made her sad. “You thought that I’d like Heathcliff, relate to him. Gypsy child, I guess you were thinking. Anyway I hate Heathcliff because he totally fucks up Cathy’s life, knows he’s doing it. He fucking tortures her. He leaves her, knows she’s going to marry the other guy and then comes back when she’s pregnant and won’t let her go. All that “You teach me now how cruel you've been.” Because she’s let her husband make her pregnant. Christ, stay away and let her have a fucking life you asshole. Anyway, when people started thinking we were a thing I knew I had to truck on out of your life. Course I didn’t bargain on you wanting to run away with the circus so…”

“Ok, so it’s a saviour complex thing is it? Because it’s really not your place to save me. You can’t choose for me because you don’t know my life. What makes you think you’re so much wiser than me?” She was mad at him but she was well aware that she was planning to choose for him just as he had done for her.

“You don’t know what it’s like Betty. You’re still on vacation here. You can just leave and pick up a life, go to college, get a decent job, have a life outside. You can cross the midway you know? It’s not like that for me. I’ve always felt kind of wrong here but there’s nowhere else for me to be. I guess that’s what books have given me, a way to be less alone or at least a way to live with that loneliness. I can travel with Holden Caulfield, he and I are freaks together, or be on the outside looking in with Jay Gatsby. Just like me, Meursault can’t get a handle on why everyone else just gets it in when we don’t. What did David Foster Wallace say? I learned it, hang on. ‘We all suffer alone in the real world. A piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain. We become less alone inside.’ That’s it. That’s how I feel. And I’ve only ever found that connection in fiction and in some letters that a little middle school girl sent me.

She didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t mad anymore, not about him giving up on her and pushing her away, not about him refusing to try to get out, not about any of it. She just felt sad, for him, for her, for FP snoring on the couch, reeking of candy canes, all similarly trapped. It was like one of the terrible Beckett plays that Kevin made her read with him, all the characters stuck, waiting for nothing to change. So she leaned forward on her chair and kissed him, to feel less alone, to force the narrative forward. He flinched but finally her passion broke the inertia and he kissed her back, leaning over her, putting his fingers in her hair and tugging it backwards so her head tilted up to him. He stood then, looming over her, kissing her harder, his tongue against her lips, demanding. She moaned, strangely pliant to his will, feeling that she would never refuse him anything. She reached up and grabbed his belt finally feeling the desire that had been missing between her and Archie. He’d been so right when he said she had never wanted him. But then Jug flung himself away from her, gasping, his lips swollen from her kisses.

“Fuck Betty. It’s not going to happen. It’s not right, not for you and certainly not for me. You’ll go and it’ll be worse and I’ll end up…” He looked at his dad. “Look you should go. Thanks for taking care of my dad. I’m sorry about...everything.”

She wanted, more than anything, to connect with him. He wasn’t going to let that happen physically so she was going to make it happen in some other way. She put a hand on his cheek and he brought those lapis eyes to hers, confused and wary. “I care about you Jug. So much. I’ve cared about you for years and I’m not going to stop. You’ve always been my friend, the most interesting person I know. It’s always been you.” She placed a soft kiss on his cheek and grabbed her phone and left. In a way she was pleased he hadn’t let it go further. If he had it would have made it so much harder to betray him by sending his book out into the world. And she was definitely doing that.

At first she tried typing the book up on her phone. She’d left her laptop behind in Riverdale in favour of bringing her toolbox. After she typed up one laborious page she knew she didn’t have the patience for that so she asked Toni who lent her a slightly elderly Dell with a missing k on the keyboard. She said she was thinking about applying for online colleges and took the computer out by the Ferris wheel and typed for hours in the early mornings. She made very minor edits as she went, he opened parenthetical commas but never closed them out, he was too fond of a semi colon, but on the whole she acted purely as a scribe. Jug still stopped by when she was working on the bikes or she’d lift her head out of the internal mechanism of an orbiter and find him slouching against one of the cars, pretending he had just been passing. She thought sometimes that his eyes lingered over her thighs in denim cut offs but she put it down to wishful thinking. She knew that she had trouble focusing when he stretched his arms above his head revealing a v of muscle low on his belly between his t shirt and his jeans. Weirdly it made her mouth water as it did as she unwrapped a piece of hard candy. Sometimes he’d say, “Betty…” in a tone that suggested he was going to ask a question and then simply leave the note hanging. She’d say “What?…What?” but he’d shake his head and say that he had to see about something and stride away. 

Ten days later she had typed up everything that she had photographed. She needed to get back into Jughead’s bedroom- for the rest of the manuscript, obviously. The jump from Georgia to Alabama was savage. It started to rain in sheets before dawn as they tore down the lot in Perry so everyone was soaked and bad tempered before the drive even began. Three hours later they approached Montgomery where it was still raining. They had to set up and be open for business that evening, meaning that no-one got any sleep between two locations. Setting up the silo for FP and Jug’s act was a day long job that they had to get done perfectly in six and a half hours. It had to be bone dry before they could ride too. Since the bikes were already tuned and in a good way and she was pretty well rehearsed in standing still and showing some leg while knives whizzed through the air at her, she stuck around to offer coffee and sandwiches to the roustabouts who were helping with construction. She was hoping that, while Jughead was occupied setting up, she’d be able to copy more of the manuscript. She plugged in her phone to make sure she had maximum charge and set to it with the coffee pot. She made her third coffee pass and the men had demolished two rounds of turkey sandwiches. She’d managed to scrounge the ingredients to make brownies and she took them out earning a grin from Jug as he sheltered in the lea of the trailer to stuff one into his mouth. Back in the trailer she decided that she had to seize the moment. She recovered the pages from the springs of the bed and took them to the table. She quickly settled to a rhythm, groups of six pages, photographed, turned and replaced in order on the pile. She was thinking she might be able to finish the job when she heard footsteps on the stoop. She recognised the footfall, definitely him not FP. In a panic she grabbed the pages and shoved them under the oilcloth on the table, no time to replace them under the mattress. There was an accusatory bump under the oil cloth. He’d be certain to see it and the whole game would be up. He flung the door open and stood in the main room, dripping wet from the rain, his hair hanging limply in his eyes, water still cascading down his face and dripping from his chin. His clothes were soaked through. She wasn’t mad about it. His shirt was plastered to the smooth planes of his chest and belly, his jeans were dripping from the turn ups onto the floor. “Wet,” he said, unnecessarily. 

She really didn’t want him to stand in the living room, noticing the odd shape under the cloth. That might have had something to do with it. She had a natural, nurturing instinct for him to get out of those wet things. That could have played a part. Mostly she had to admit, her resolve was just wearing very thin. She took a step forward, renewing an offer she had made before. He saw it in her eyes. “Oh fuck it,” he said, lunging towards her and kissing her hard. A tiny voice in her head was saying that she would have to tell him about the manuscript if this went any further but she told that tiny voice to screw itself and leaned into the kiss. 

“You’re soaked,” she murmured. “Take this off.” She pulled at the hem of the t shirt and he lifted it over his head in one move, shaking his hair as he threw it off and spraying water everywhere. She grabbed his hand and steered him away from the incriminating table, into the bedroom, reaching for a towel that was draped over the back of the door. She pushed him toward the bed and stood over him, rubbing his hair with the towel and then using it to wipe down his shoulders and chest. His eyes closed a little at the roughness of the fabric against his skin. She combed her fingers through the tangles of his hair, brushing her fingertips against his scalp until he moaned in pleasure. She had no real experience to draw on when it came to this but she was working on pure instinct. It seemed to her that he needed to be loved, to be treated with softness and affection and so that was what she was going to give him. He rested his head against her hip as she stroked his hair and placed soft kisses on his head. When he looked up at her his eyes were wet.

“Thank you for caring about me Betty. I don’t deserve it,” he whispered. 

“It’s not about what you deserve. I’ll always care about you. I have no idea how to stop. Kiss me. Please.” He stood and put his lips against hers, softly. Then he kissed her throat, her neck. He began to unbutton her shirt, kissing her where each button exposed new flesh. 

“Is this OK Betts? Are you sure?”

“I’m so sure Jug. Please, don’t stop,” she said, so quietly that he had to lean in still further to hear her. He put his hand inside her open shirt and touched her breast lightly. She pushed herself forward to make firmer contact and he got the idea and gently pressed his fingers into the lace covered flesh. She gasped, she had no idea it could feel like that, pulses running from her throat to her breasts to the core of her, making her shake with longing. She put a knee on the bed and leaned backwards pulling him with her.

“Wait, wait a sec,” he muttered, striding back to the door and dropping the latch before returning to the bed and unbuckling his belt. She propped herself on her elbows to watch as he took off his boots. He began to move back towards her but she stopped him with a look. “Off,” she said, glaring at his still wet jeans. He grinned at her, unbuttoned them and pushed them off. She stared at him. She knew he was beautiful, she’d seen his chest and his shoulders often in the act and around the lot, knew his hips were slim and his legs were long and well shaped but to see all the olive skin at once was a lot to take in. He was perfect. The stunt riding quite obviously was offering the kind of core workout that celebs would swoon over but he was finely made, not all straining tendons and bulging muscle. His body was elegant, svelte. She sat up and ran her fingers over his chest and his belly, then down to touch him through the damp fabric of his boxers. He gasped. “I’m at a disadvantage here Betts. No fair,” gesturing to her still almost fully clothed. She smiled and shrugged off her unbuttoned shirt and wriggled out of her jean shorts. Then, caught up in the excitement, she reached behind herself and unclipped her bra. That was when her confidence deserted her. She held the cups of the bra over her chest and looked up at him. Would he accept her, all that she was, or would he be disappointed by her? He must have sensed it because he looked into her eyes. “Betty, you see me. You always have. I think you know me better than almost anyone. I trust you. You can trust me. I never want to hurt you. Never.” She smiled and let her arms fall, the lace drifting off her so that he could look at her. He kept looking into her eyes for a moment before finally looking down, trailing his eyes over her body. “Oh God Betty, you’re so beautiful. But you’re good too. You’re kind and brave and clever. I want you so much. Am I being selfish?”

“No, I want you. I want all of you,” she kissed his chest, running her hands over him again, trying to work out what he might want from her, trying so hard not to disappoint him. He touched her breasts, stroking her and caressing her skin so gently that she was almost sobbing with desire. Finally he lowered his head and began to kiss her there, sucking a nipple into his soft mouth so that she gasped and moaned in surprise and pleasure. He dragged his teeth over her and she almost screamed, feeling herself losing control. He reached down and touched her, over her underwear and she began to pant. She had never felt so aware of every inch of her body, each nerve seemed to be singing with anticipation. “I want…I need…” she whispered.

“What? Tell me what you like. I want it to be so good for you. Tell me.” His voice was gravelly, rumbling though her making her belly clench in spasms.

“I don’t know. I’ve never…” He stopped abruptly, shock on his face. 

“But the boyfriend. You said you were together for two years.” He was staring at her, sitting back from her.

“I wasn’t ready. He didn’t push it. Things weren’t really like that between us.” She didn’t understand what was happening but he wasn’t kissing her anymore. Something had changed. It was happening again. She was going to lose him again.

“Fuck Betty. Are you saying you’re a virgin?”

“Yes, is that bad? You don’t want me because I’ve never done it before?” She was almost crying now, her lust shrivelling into shame at his rejection.

“Betty, I can’t. You’ve been saving yourself for someone special. Someone a hell of a lot more worthy than me. I’m not about to ruin that for you. It ought to matter.”

“And this wasn’t special. I guess not for you. How many women have you had here? How many of them, coming back here after the show to get their own special encore. So I’m just another one of those for you. Only worse because I don’t know what I’m doing. Is that right?” She started grabbing at her clothes, trying to cover herself.

“No. Christ. Look there were women. They wanted something from me and I gave it to them. I didn’t care about it and sometimes they were nice. It felt nice to be wanted, to be held by someone. And they gave me stuff, money, books. So that’s who I am. Certainly not someone who deserves you. If this could just be something that we both want right now then it’d be OK but for your first time it’s not right at all.”

“OK, how about I go find Sweetpea and get him to fuck me first? Then I could come back, could I?”

His eyes flashed with absolute rage and for a moment she felt a quiver of fear but then he was grabbing his still wet clothes and pulling them on. “I can’t be here with you. You make me absolutely crazy. I hope to God you aren’t serious because if you are you’ll get either me or Sweetpea killed. Think about that before you go round offering yourself to every man on the lot.” With that he was gone, slamming the door on her sobs.

She felt desolate and humiliated but she straightened her back, absorbed the blow as she had absorbed so many before, got dressed and went back to photographing his pages. When he was published and she was out of his life forever, he’d think back on this and be sorry. It would serve him right.

**Here’s the bottom line. The carnival does not exist for fun or pleasure or to provide an escape. It exists in order to get money out of your pockets and into ours. I remember being sent out to work some little side show booth or crooked game when I was ten or eleven, my pop saying as I left, “Hey kid, GTFM.” It stands for Get The Fucking Money. It could be written above the door of every attraction on the lot, it’s our credo, our code, our mantra. GTFM. We have to hustle hard though. At those big state fairs there’s the ding to pay before you start to turn any cash at all. The ding, the expenses that you have to pay to the ground, utilities, trash collection, insurance, sales tax, I.D. badges, parking space for the trailer, security, inspection fees, advertising, official shirts, a tip to the lot manager. Then they take 50% of your gross even though they already took almost that on the ding. Soon it feels like you’re paying them for the honour of risking your neck to provide a very minor divertissement to folks who actually think it’s cool to wear a t shirt that says “Hairdressers Tease It Til It Stands Up.”**

She completed the typing on a Wednesday. He’d been avoiding her and that worked fine for her. She’d decided there was no point in starting something which would be over as soon as she told him that she’d found a publisher for his book. She never doubted that it would be published. He’d be furious. The only question was whether he’d be furious enough to prevent publication. Even if she had managed to get into Jughead Jones’ jeans that would be over as soon as he found out what she’d done. She had to accept that she wanted him published even more than she wanted to make love to him. It was close, but publication had it by a nose. She researched the protocols and procedures for submitting manuscripts and learned that the first thing to do was to secure the services of a literary agent so she spent several hours finding out who represented the kinds of writers of whom Jughead might approve. Then she patiently wrote letters and filled in online forms to submit ten pages and a synopsis or three chapters and an outline or whatever other Kafkaesque requirements were made. Finally there was nothing to do but wait.

The carnival was heading to Louisiana to finish out the season before travelling to Florida to overwinter. FP wanted to buy a new bike to replace the spare which was becoming uneconomical to fix. Betty was thinking about heading back to Riverdale for a few months, seeing if she could get her job at the dealership back to tide her through the hiatus. She intended to join up with the carnival again in the new season when she would no longer be a green hire, Thomas might even start calling her a trouper. She was starting to lean how to throw knives herself and if she could make some progress in the off season she’d be worth more in the act.

They’d only been in Shreveport for three days when she got a call. That seemed to be fast. A literary agent, Bonnie, wanted to talk to Forsythe about the novel. Betty was flummoxed for a moment but then she came up with a spiel. “Look the thing is he’s a little eccentric. He’s a hard worker and he’s reliable but he can’t be dealing with the commercial issues. He’s an artist, you can see that from the manuscript. He’s asked me to handle the business side; I’m his girlfriend.”

Bonnie said she needed to have a signed letter of authority before she could proceed. But she also said that it was a promising book and she thought she could sell it. Betty said she’d get the letter and then, having ended the call, tried to figure out how. As she walked over to the workshop trailer she had an idea. FP was leaning against the side of his trailer and she waved at him. “Hey FP you know I’m heading to Riverdale for a few weeks? I hear from a pal that someone’s got a couple of Indian Scouts to sell. I could negotiate for them while I’m up there. What do you think?”

FP nodded. Yeah, that’s good. You know what you’re looking for. Go ahead. I can transfer the money to you if you think they’re OK.”

“Yeah, only thing is, I’m still only eighteen. If you signed a letter to say I’m acting for you it’d strengthen my bargaining. They’ll know I’m not some dumb kid messing round. I can download a template. You’d just need to sign.” FP said she was a smart girl and Betty grinned to herself, agreeing. With the addition of just one I after FP Jones II’s name she’d have her letter. 

At that moment, Jughead appeared around the corner of the trailer with Toni and she looked him up and down before turning sharply and walking away in the other direction. She heard him sigh and Toni ask him what the hell he’d done to Betty before she was out of earshot. She wondered what he’d say. When she thought about that it made her pause for a moment. Would he say, “I got her all hot and bothered and then changed my mind,” or “I thought I wanted to have sex with her but then I realised I didn’t and now she won’t forgive me for being a prick tease.” Both of those accounts were true and if the gender roles had been reversed she would have realised at once that she was in the wrong instead of it taking her more than a week to see it. He had every right to change his mind. Her excitement put no obligation on him to do anything at all. If she’d changed her mind she knew he would have been kind and understanding. He would have forgiven her and they’d still be friends. She turned around again and strode back. Jug was still talking to Toni, his hands outstretched in appeal. She looked mad at him. “Hey Toni, he didn’t do anything. I’m being stupid. I’m sorry Jug. My bad. Friends?” 

He smiled at her a little uncertainly and she offered a handshake to show she was sincere. He ignored it and pulled her into a hug, kissing her on the cheek affectionately. “Careful, don’t get me all aroused again. You don’t even know you’re doing it,” she whispered as he pulled back, looking alarmed. She giggled and he laughed in relief. 

Toni looked from one to the other of them and back. “God you two, will you just do it already and get it over with. The sexual tension is too much.”

Betty glanced at Toni and said, “No sexual tension on my side Toni. I wouldn’t touch him with yours.” She smiled widely and walked away again, feeling only a little conflicted about her plan.

At the end of the week in Louisiana Betty was packing her bag for her long trip when she got another call from Bonnie. The doctored letter had done the job. She was calling to say that Hachette was prepared to publish the book. Bonnie had negotiated a twenty thousand dollar advance and then twelve percent on hardback and nine percent on paperback. Betty, having done her research, asked about the print runs and was surprised that the hardback would have a ten thousand hardback run to begin with. Paperback would then be determined by how well those sold. Bonnie said that for a literary novel it was a good deal and Betty had to agree. Bonnie also told her that he would have to agree to a book tour. “No-one publishing literary fiction is going to do it without the writer doing publicity Betty. It just isn’t going to happen. If he wants to be a published writer he needs to do more than just writing.” Twenty thousand dollars would buy him a hell of a lot of freedom, it would be worth a few readings. She asked Bonnie to email her the papers. “I’ll talk to him tonight Bonnie. It’s time for him to get involved,” she said, as her stomach flipped in a few slow rolls. 

Betty spent every night of the week, in an outfit more revealing than most of her underwear, being catcalled by a hundred people while blades were launched at her by a guy who grew his own sinsemilla in a glass extension on his trailer. What really scared her though was admitting to Jughead Jones that she’d earned him twenty thousand dollars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jug misquotes DFW. (Give him a break...he’s quoting from memory there...) Here’s what he actually said...  
> “We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.” 
> 
> There’s going to be an end note about DFW but he was a great writer, a genius, who deserves his words be shared accurately. There really aren't too many writers like that.


	5. How Much Better, How Much Better Can My Life Get?

**The morning midway, the one that we carneys wake to every day, is a different beast from the one that turned in a circle to tread down a nest and finally settled itself to sleep. There’s the smell of rancid cooking oil and spoilt meat on the cool air. The yellowing, trodden grass is slick with dew and other, less poetic, oozings and excretions. There are always discarded items of underwear and used prophylactics at the back of the lot, behind the rides; adrenaline is a powerful aphrodisiac. There’s a lot call, the time when we have to be back at our work. We clean up, or at least we move the trash out of sight and we patch costumes and check the equipment. Bearings are replaced, chipped paint is covered with fresh, motors are refuelled and booths are restocked with cheap prizes. There are mouths to feed and errands to run before the crowds start to trek back in through the gates to do the whole thing again. The evening visitors have a few short hours in which to see through the dazzle of the lights, to understand that the glittering facade has precisely nothing behind it, that the beautiful girl in the feathers and lace will only let you look, not touch. For those that are “with it”, who live in the permanent impermanence of the carnival, that knowledge is hammered home every single morning. Our eyes adjusted to the lights years ago, we see the morning’s disappointment overlaid on every moment of the evening’s laughter, smell the corruption in the sweetness. It’s impossible not to become cynical when you know too much.**

She waited nervously until after the show and when Jug stepped out of the arena she stood in front of him. “We need to talk Jug.” He looked concerned.

“I thought we were OK Betty. I’m not going to change my mind if that’s what this is about.”

“God Jug, I’m not all about your…you know. Give a girl a little credit. I do have layers you know,“ she laughed at the fact that she was the innocent virgin but he was the one blushing at her implication. “C’mon, let’s go and get a milkshake. I’m leaving tomorrow. I think you still owe me one.”

A few minutes later, tugging her jacket around her because she was shivering but suspecting that it wasn’t the chill in the air that was bothering her, she sat with him on the steps of the deserted Ferris wheel. The last few mooches were wandering out of the park as she sipped a tiger’s blood milkshake and felt nostalgic for a place she hadn’t yet left.

“So home to Riverdale tomorrow?” he asked, clearly searching for a topic of conversation other than the elephant in the room.

“Yep, but I’ll be back in February for the Florida State Fair. I’ll be a carney yet.” He smiled, a little sadly. “I know it isn’t what you want but I love it. What if you could do what you love? What would it be?”

“I guess I’d write, but it’s not going to happen. My dad needs me, the show needs me. No point dreaming, it just hurts.”

She took a deep breath and tried to calm her nerves. “OK, you’re about to be really, really mad at me. That’s fine, I don’t mind. The important thing is that I don’t want you being mad at me to stop you doing what’s right for you. Can you just listen to me before you start yelling?” He looked scared to death, not being able to anticipate what she was going to tell him, the coloured lights from the ferris wheel illuminating the sharp angles of his cheekbones, his eyes wide and still the same Lapis colour that she realised she had fallen in love with all those years ago. She was trying to commit him to memory because she suspected this might be the last time they ever talked like this, like friends. 

“What the hell Betts? What have you done?”

“Your dad showed me your manuscript. I’ve read it. No stop, listen before you yell. You’ve got a deal to publish it, Hachette Jug, Hachette want it. Twenty thousand advance. Ten thousand run in hardback. Nine percent on paperback. It’s enough to get out if you want to. OK now yell.”

His mouth had been opening and closing like a guppy. If it wasn’t so nerve wracking it would be comical. “You read it?”

She nodded. “It’s wonderful, Jug. It deserves to be published. It’s too good to keep to yourself.”

At that moment the Ferris wheel lights went out. The show was over. Now he was just a dark shadow against a dark sky, his expression impossible to make out.

When he spoke his voice was barely a whisper. “Who gave you the right to read it? That’s mine. It was for me. Everything gets fucking taken from me. Everything I am is always for sale to the highest goddamn bidder. My dreams, my safety, my time, even sex and now you sell the book without my consent. Why does everything have to be about getting the fucking money? That book is me, it’s who I am, that’s my mind, my goddamn soul. You can’t just sell it and think that’s OK. I would never have done that to you Betty, never. I can’t fucking look at you. It isn’t OK.” 

“I know that you’ll probably never forgive me. I knew that when I did it. I did what I did. Hate me if you want. But then you need to decide what to do. Here’s the contract,” she pulled the papers out from inside her jacket and handed them to him, hoping to god that that he didn’t rip them up. “You sign it and send it to Bonnie, she’s your agent, the address is in there, and become a writer or you tear it up and keep your book under your mattress with my love letters and keep reading the midway for loose change. It’s up to you. Oh, by the way, in case I never see you again, I love you Jughead Jones. I’ve loved you since I was eight. That’s why I never slept with Archie. Loving you was just too old a habit to break. Be happy.” She stood and walked away. She’d planned to leave at first light but since she was packed anyway she grabbed her bag, kissed Toni goodbye, and headed out to call a cab and wait at the bus station for the first bus north.

There was a silly romantic girl who lived inside her head, wounded by what life had thrown at her, sure, but still just about alive. That silly little girl kept looking at the door of the bus station, waiting for the roar of his bike engine, waiting for the sound of his footsteps on the path, waiting for him to fling open the door and grab her, spinning her into his arms while the love theme of the movie played in swelling orchestrations. He’d growl, “You’re not going anywhere,” and take her back to his trailer and have her in every way she could imagine until she was all used up. Sadly the silly romantic girl had fallen for a man given to brooding and sulking and who had one of the most well developed persecution complexes ever observed. So, obviously, he didn’t come. She changed buses in Atlanta and in New York and two days later, dirty, sick from too much bus station food and too little sleep, she stepped off the bus in Riverdale. 

The bus stop was right outside Pop’s and she’d been dreaming of a plate of ham and eggs and a cold glass of orange juice for hours so she stepped down and headed across the road. She’d eat and then she would have to find a room to rent where her knife throwing wouldn’t disturb the neighbours and ask Mr Mantle to give her a job. 

As she pushed open the door, he stood up from the booth where he had been sitting with a cup of black coffee and her world seemed to flip over, him as the point of rotation. She hadn’t even noticed the bike outside. “Hi Betty,” he said like they were acquaintances, meeting for brunch. She caught a sob in her throat. She understood something at last. She would never see him without feeling the G force of him. Her blood centrifuged, her vision blurred, he exerted a gravitational force on her that was so much greater than the Earth’s that it glued her heart to him; even if she could break it she’d just be in free fall with nowhere to land.

“How did you get here?” she asked weakly.

“Bike’s outside. Twenty four hours but I did stop a couple of times, bathroom, food, that kind of thing.” 

“Why? What do you want?” She couldn’t bear it if the answer wasn’t that he wanted her. Pop was walking over to her and she paused in the interrogation to throw her arms around his neck and kiss his cheek, she needed to hold onto something firm. He told her that he’d missed her, that Archie was the only one left and he was pretty lonely. She smiled sadly and he took her order and looked at Jughead. 

“Same please,” he said, “And a refill,” he added holding up his cup.

“Young man you must have coffee running in your veins by now. I’m bringing you decaf. If you’re a pal of Betty’s I’m going to take better care of you.”

“Talk,” Betty demanded as Pop headed off to get their orders, “Why are you here?”

“Well that’s been changing on the way. In Louisiana I wasn’t done yelling at you so I was planning to come here and yell a bit more. Then through Mississippi and Alabama I got to thinking about why you might have done what you did and I wanted to ask you, to try to understand. But then in Virginia I worked it out. You did it because you thought you knew how to run my life better than I did so I got mad again and went back to the yelling idea. In Maryland I had a thought.”

“Had to happen eventually,” she snarked, beginning to adjust to his presence.

“As I was saying,” he resumed, shooting her look of remonstrance, “I had a thought. If you were running my life I’d be a published writer with twenty grand in the bank, and a beautiful woman in my bed instead of alone, broke and almost certain to snap my neck in the next few years for almost no money. I guess you might do a better job at running my life that I’m doing.” Betty began to interrupt but he continued, “As I say that was Maryland. In Pennsylvania I got mad again because it’s my life so if I want to screw it up then that’s up to me. So I guess I’m kind of back to yelling. But now I’m feeling like a dick about it.”

“I’m sorry Jug. I should have tried to persuade you rather than taking it into my own hands. I just didn’t think that I could. And once I’d read the book I knew it wasn’t just about you. I think it’s a great book. It needs to be published. You’ll think this is dumb but I think works of art ought to have some rights too and that book has the right to be read. Otherwise it’s like some awful art collector buying up great paintings and keeping them in a closet til the value goes up, stopping people from seeing them.”

“So, “sorry not sorry” is your line, right? Anyway when I got into town I signed the contract and put it in the mail. I’ve done it now. You’ve got your way.” He smiled a little sheepishly and she stood and threw her arms around his neck over the table, kissing his cheek. 

“Well done Jug, I’m so happy for you. Really.”

She sat back down as Pop brought over their food. They were both starving and fell to it without further ado. As she finished she looked up to find him watching her. “Sorry, I was so hungry. There was nothing decent at the bus stations.”

“No, I was enjoying watching you. I’ve been thinking about that day in Montgomery…you know.”

“Yes Jug, I remember that day in Montgomery. I tried to forget it but it’s not easy to blank out throwing yourself at a man who doesn’t want you. Thanks for bringing it up.”

“Betts you know it wasn’t that. I wanted you so much. I always wanted you. I was doing the same thing that you did. I’d decided what you should do with your life, with your body. Maybe we need to back the hell off from deciding things for each other.”

“Or we could try talking about it. You know that I want you to be happy right? More than anything else.” He looked at her then, his eyes so soft with affection and trust that it made it hard for her to swallow the lump that had appeared in her throat. Finally he nodded.

“I guess I do know that Betts. I feel the same way about you. That evening when I was outside here and you came by with the boyfriend?” He picked up her hand and began to stroke over her palm with his thumb in a way that she found unbelievably arousing.

“Yeah, Archie.” 

“Whatever. When I saw you with him it felt like you were crushing my heart, like it was an actual real pain. But I was happy too. You seemed to have found someone to love you and take care of you and that mattered so much more than the pain. I felt…vindicated I suppose. Like I’d done a good thing.”

“A far far better thing? Did you ever think that perhaps I was miserable? And for sure I was making him miserable. You need to at least consider the possibility that I might be right about you Jug.”

He lifted one eyebrow in query. “Right how?”

“Right to want you. That could be a rational decision rather than pure self sabotage. Be objective for a second. You’re stupidly hot. You have to admit that. Women want you. Right?”

“Yeah but they don’t know what I’m like. If they knew…”

“Ok but objectively hot. Second you’re nineteen years old and a major publishing firm have just made a substantial offer for a book you wrote. That suggests that you’re pretty goddamn talented. That’s not me, that’s twenty thousand bucks of capitalism’s finest evidence. So you’re hot and you’re talented. I know, I know, you think you’re bad or unworthy somehow. You’re not. That day in Montgomery a girl you claim to find attractive threw herself at you, pretty much begged you to make love to her but you thought it wasn’t right for her so you walked away. Where’s the moral void at the heart of you that you’re protecting me from?”

“Look Betts, I know how it goes. Like my mom, she was a townie girl who got the hots for the guy in the daredevil show. She shacked up with him, a possum belly queen, and then she was knocked up and trapped and saw for sure that he was trash. She got out eventually but the wreckage has been pretty tough to negotiate.” He released a sad, cynical laugh at that. 

“But I’m a carney too now. I’m not a green hire. I speak the language. I’m with it. You’re some fancy writer, maybe a college boy if you want to be. If anyone’s going to be the possum belly queen it’s you.”

He laughed at the incongruity of the role reversal but he was starting to look at her differently. She could feel the tension between them resurfacing. He hadn’t ridden all that way if he didn’t want her. She needed to be alone with him but had nowhere to go. He must have felt it too because there was a flush along his cheekbones when he said “You tired?” She looked at him through her lashes in what she hoped was a sexy way but she’d been on a bus for two days and sexy seemed like a high bar right now. Still his voice was low and rough when he said, “I got a motel room. I don’t know if…”

“You do know Jughead. How could you not know? How much reassurance can you possibly need? C’mon. Let’s go.” She paid the check, smiled at Pop and walked out with Jughead towards the bike. 

The motel room was spartan but clean. She realised she hadn’t slept in a building for months. It felt strange. She stood in the doorway, looking around and wondering what was going to happen. He took her hands and gazed at her. “So you said we could talk about stuff, decide together right?” She nodded, feeling suddenly shy and nervous. “OK. I really want to be with you Betty. Do you want that too? It’s fine if you don’t by the way. You can just go to sleep. I promise I won’t do anything.”

“I do want it. I want to have a shower and brush my teeth and then I want you.”

“OK.” He breathed deeply and sat down on the edge of the bed with his hands on his thighs. “I’m really nervous. I’ve never…you know…with someone I cared about. OK. You have a shower. I’m going out for …supplies. You need anything?”

“No. I’m good. Scared about the supplies though.”

“I’m going to buy rubbers Betty. I was trying to be discreet.” 

She laughed, “Oh thank God. I thought you were going to buy chains or handcuffs or something.”

“Well, I think we’d better start a little less ambitious than that. You know vanilla’s my favourite. Back in a sec.” He stood and kissed her and went out closing the door softly. It wasn’t until she had been in the shower for a few minutes that she started to feel worried that he wouldn’t come back. She stepped out of the water, brushed her teeth and rummaged through her bag for anything cute to wear. She came up empty. Then she saw that he had left his bag on a chair and she picked up one of his soft t shirts and pulled it on. She lay on the bed to wait.

When she woke up the room was dark and her cheek was resting against his steadily rising and falling chest. She smiled and wondered what he would do if he knew that she would like to wake up like this forever. She was thirsty so she sat up and looked around for a water glass. There was a bunch of flowers on her night stand that hadn’t been there before. In the bathroom she drank several glasses of water before padding back into the bedroom. She saw his eyes shining in the darkness. “Hey there sleepy head. You were out for the count when I got back.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“No, you needed to rest. You made all these cute little noises when I lay down with you. You said my name in your sleep. I really fucking liked it.”

“I wonder what else you might like,” she said, sitting on the bed and running her hand up his chest under his shirt. 

“Oh, well that’s pretty nice.” She could hear the smile in his voice but she wanted to see him. She wondered if that was wrong, a bad thing to want. Perhaps it was meant to happen in the dark. “Hey Betts? Do you mind if I make it a little lighter in here? Would that be ok?”

She grinned and murmured, “Yes please, I’d like that.” He stood and turned on the bathroom light, partly closing the door so that only a little of the light leaked in softly. 

“Now where were we?” he whispered and ran his own hand under the t shirt she had stolen from him. “Oh yeah, that’s where we were isn’t it?” His hands were moving over her breasts and he leaned over to kiss her neck, softly but occasionally sucking a little on her skin. She wanted him to kiss her where his hands were exploring so she reached down for the hem of the shirt and pulled it off. He smiled, pulled off his own shirt and began to kiss her shoulders, her collar bones, her breasts. He sucked one of her nipples into his mouth and groaned around it and she began to vibrate with desire, needing more of something. She allowed her hands to wander over his chest and belly, holding his hips with her fingertips, pushing into the flesh, wanting to leave a bruise. 

He began to kiss lower, her belly, her hips. He was tracing his fingers along her inner thighs, so close to where her underwear ended, back and forward, over and over again, so close to where she wanted him to touch her. Eventually she could bear it no longer and she reached out and grabbed the waistband of his boxers, pushing it down so that she could put her hand around him. “Oh,” he sighed, “oh Betts.”

“Show me,” she whispered and he put his hand over hers and showed her what he liked. She felt so powerful, with just a movement of her hand she could make him groan, force his eyes closed, make his own hand stutter on her. She thought that she would like to keep her hand on him always. Then she found a new favourite thing. His hand was inside her underwear, stroking up and down again and again. She had touched herself, had even allowed herself to be touched a few times but nothing had been like this. Without her realising that she was doing it her legs were opening wider, giving him complete access to herself, gasping and raising her hips, seeking more and more. He had his thumb pressing against her and now his fingers began to move downwards, so slowly that she thought that she would scream if he didn’t give her more. He pushed one long finger inside her, exhaling as he did so, in pleasure or relief or some other emotion, she wasn’t sure. He began to move his hand, still stroking with his thumb. There was just pleasure, nothing else, and so much of it, not limit on it, no careful measuring of how much was permitted. She couldn’t focus on touching him anymore and she let her hand fall onto the mattress, clutching at the sheet as she was swept along on the sensations running through her. He began to kiss her breasts again and she cried out as her senses adjusted to the overload. Then he whispered, “I’m going to use my mouth, is that ok? I’ll stop if you don’t like it. But you’ll like it.” 

She didn’t know if she could speak but she nodded and he grinned as he moved down her body, looking into her eyes as he went. His thumb was replaced by his lips as he kissed and sucked, moving two fingers inside her. She didn’t know if it was ok to like it as much as she did. It felt like something transgressive, like people would know that she was some kind of sex maniac when they looked at her from now on but he didn’t seem inclined to judge her even though she couldn’t hold in the moans and sobs. She felt the tension in her belly becoming more and more intense and she began to fight against it, scared to lose control but also scared that it would be over. He saw it somehow and he looked up at her and said, “Just let it take you Betts. You’re safe. I’ve got you.” It was like the roller coaster, the ooooh of the slow ascent, higher and higher, the pause at the very top, excitement making it hard to breathe and then the plunging, exhilarating, terrifying release. She sobbed out the breath that she had been holding but his arms were around her, anchoring her. She grabbed for his hand, squeezing it as she began to recover herself and finally she stared at him, amazed that it could be like that. The smugness on his face was both infuriating and completely sweet.

“Yeah, OK Jones. You did good,” she muttered, still a little hoarse. She tried to reach for him to help him with his situation but he held her hand. 

“Hey, it’s OK. You sleep a little. There’s time,” and she snuggled against his chest again as he stroked her hair until she fell asleep.

When she woke again he was snoring a little. She remembered her mother kicking her dad out of their room to sleep in the den because he snored but she just found it cute when he did it. She sat up carefully and pulled on some sweatpants and his stolen t shirt to go in search of coffee. Ten minutes later she was back with two take out cups to find him pacing inside. “You were gone,” he accused. She held up the cups in explanation but he continued to scowl. “I got nervous. I thought you’d left.”

“And left you my clothes and my phone as a souvenir? After last night you’re going to have to pull me off with tweezers like a tick, Jones. Now why the hell have you got dressed? Come here.” She pulled him towards her and unbuttoned his jeans. 

They were soon tangled together on the bed, the coffee forgotten, as they gasped against each other’s skin. She remembered how he liked to be touched and he had his hand between her legs, working her towards a climax when she pushed away his hand. He looked at her in confusion. “It’s good Jug, so good, but I want the real deal. Please.”

“Yeah but you might not get there like that. Women don’t sometimes. I can just…”

“I don’t mind about that. It’s kind of a symbol or something. I want it. Please. I’m ready.” 

“Right, we’re going to take it slow though. Tell me if you want to stop or you change your mind OK?” She nodded and he touched her again with his fingers. “OK, calm down. I’m getting to it,” he laughed. He reached over to the nightstand for the condoms he’d bought and made quick work of getting one onto himself.

“Should I have done that?” she asked, concerned. 

“Betts, there’s no “should.” It isn’t the driving exam. You aren’t going to fail.” He began to stroke her hair back with real tenderness, letting his hand linger over her neck, down across her skin on her side to her hip. She lay back and reached for him and he understood that this was something she needed for reasons other than just pleasure. He touched her again, dipping his head to kiss her breasts and then positioned himself above her, taking his weight on his elbows. She reached down to guide him against her and gradually he pushed. She felt his nearness so profoundly that tears sprang up in her eyes. He saw and stopped at once. “Am I hurting you? Stop?”

“No. I just never felt so close to anyone before. It’s amazing. You’re amazing,” she whispered against his shoulder, holding onto him as if she feared he’d disappear. He moved against her again and she gasped. Suddenly the strangeness of the sensation changed into something else, something that seemed much more primal. He was her man. He was hers, she was his, they could be united in the world, allies. She thrust up with her hips, driving him suddenly deeper and he moaned and thrust again, meeting her motion against him. 

“Oh god Betts, oh that’s…” 

“Please Jug, please, now. I want to be with you so much,” she sobbed and he seemed to throw off his nerves and inhibitions and he began to move in her, long smooth thrusts, touching her with his fingers, kissing her wherever he could reach. He was watching her too, trying to see how he could help her feel more but she was so caught up in her emotions that she didn’t even realise that her body was responding to him as it was, until without warning she began to spasm around him, the feeling of her body wanting him as much as her mind made her cry out. To be so complete, so absolute in her desire for him, so certain about the rightness of this moment was a revelation and she yelled his name as she came. Her passion was infectious because he seemed to simply relax into his own orgasm, thrusting gently against her before collapsing at her side, wrecked by her, by them.

She watched him as his chest rose and fell, smiling that she had made him hers at last. She had told him that she loved him before and her heart was bursting to say it again now but he had never told her and she didn’t want him to feel that he had to make a declaration that he wasn’t ready for or that he simply didn’t feel. She kept silent. “Betts?” He murmured.

“Yeah?”

“You can say it if you want. I love you too.” She smiled. 

“Ah he finally knows it. I love you. Was it the sex? I mean that was good right? I have no point of comparison but it seemed pretty damn good.”

“It was miraculous. But no, I just realised that the only reason that you would have put up with my shit for ten years was that you really, properly loved me. And I wouldn’t have forgiven anyone else for reading my manuscript but I’d forgive you anything. Might have been a mistake to tell you that.”

“Well I do love you. From your weird ass long toes to your silly swoopy hair, every tiny atom of you.”

A little later, in a quiet voice, he asked, "What am I going to do about my dad? If I'm not there?"

She propped herself on one elbow to look at him. "I guess you know what you can live with, but you just said that you think we should be allowed to make our own choices. I can't see that giving up your dreams so that you can be on hand to punch your dad unconscious is the healthiest choice. He's a grown man. You love him so you'll worry but it's his life, his choices. Right?"

On the stage, he looked up from the book. He was winding it up now. “Here’s the last section I’m going to read. It’s the end of this collection of non fiction and it’s about my life now in relation to the carnival. Maybe before I read it I should point out that my wife’s here today. Hey Betty, give the nice folks a wave. Yeah I know what you’re thinking, ‘How the hell did he get her?’ Well I’ll never tell. Anyway she’s more of a carney than me these days. She has a degree in engineering from MIT and she designs rollercoasters and other instruments of carnival torture for a living. I wear a lot of corduroy and have a Harvard alum pin on my jacket so I look a little out of place when I turn up in my fancy RV at a show ground and hook up with the smoke show in a leather jacket over there. By the way, don’t mess with her, she also knows how to throw knives. Anyway, here’s the last section.” 

**It’s a strange relationship. The townie hates and fears the carney. We’re trash, sinister in our difference. The freak show days are long gone but, really, we’ve always been the freaks. In the old days you’d pay your quarter to see wild men of Borneo or little people or bearded ladies or the fattest man in the world. Why did anyone want to gawp at Joseph Merrick or Chang and Eng? Because it made them feel more normal. If you live in a monoculture where everyone is pretty much identical then the tiniest divergence from the median makes you the freak. “D’you hear about John? I hear tell he’s got six toes on one foot. Freak.” Once you extend the bounds of the possible by showing the outliers, the man who’s three feet tall, the woman who weighs four hundred pounds, it makes the norm much more inclusive. Our otherness reinforces your reassuring, bland sameness.**

**Of course we’re doing the same thing. Carneys are an insular and self referential tribe. It takes years of being called newbie before you can be said to “speak the language.” If someone is slow to understand or easy to trick we’ll ask them, “You new?” Newness, not belonging, is the worst insult we have. Even our jokes serve to bond us to each other and exclude the rubes. If a carney is flirting with a town girl his pal will yell “Baby needs milk,” to scare her off. Like sheepdogs gathering the herd together we keep each other in line, more or less. These days I can walk through the midway and not be recognised. A talker might try to give me a spiel, try to tempt me to play his game or see his show. I’ll say “with it and on it” and he’ll wave at me and save his breath. He doesn’t know me at all but if I yell “Hey Rube!” he’ll have my back. There was a long time when I didn’t understand that that matters, it matters so much.**

There was a Q and A. She knew they frustrated him because the questions he could answer were too boring to bother with and the interesting questions couldn’t be answered in that format. So, he told them that yes, he did write everyday, yes he did get into Harvard by sending his novel in lieu of an application, yes he did occasionally ride the wall for fun. When someone asked if his dad was still a carney he couldn’t have explained how it felt when FP rode up to Boston when he sobered up after losing the silo in a drunken poker game and asked Jug if he’d pay for him to go to rehab. Those feelings were too complicated, too layered, sadness, regret, shame, pride, hope, fear. That was something he’d have to address in a novel, it’d take six hundred pages to work through.

At the end of the questions a line formed with people wanting their books signed so Betty took Archie and Veronica to get a plastic glass full of tepid wine while they waited. The flirting was pretty intense, all longing glances and coy touches but Betty was keen to support the development. After a while Veronica began to ask questions about their history together. Archie seemed keen to take the initiative. “We were kids together and we dated a bit but she was always smitten with some carney dude.” Veronica laughed. “Anyway, after graduation she ran off with the carnival and when she showed up in Riverdale on the back of his motorbike, all grown up, we decided that we’d be best pals forever.”

Betty remembered that day. Jug drove her over to the site office where Archie was working with his dad and then rode off to Pop’s to drink coffee while she visited. He understood why she needed to make peace but he didn’t want to be lurking about, all possessive, making it harder. Archie seemed shocked by her and she realised that she’d grown up since they were last together, she’d acquired a little toughness, some street smarts. Her hair was loose in waves now not pinned back as her mother had liked her to wear it. She wore tight jeans and a warm fleece lined leather jacket, one of Jug’s flannels knotted at her waist. She had hoop earrings not tiny studs. “Hi Arch. I’m not staying, just wanted to stop by and clear the air.”

“Are you alone?”

“Jughead’s waiting at Pop’s. I’ll call him to come get me.”

“Are you and he..?”

“Together? Yeah. I’m sorry I used you and hurt you Archie. You were good to me and you deserved much better. You’re a good man. If you ever think that you can forgive me then I’d like to be friends again.”

Archie was a good man and so, when she said that and assured him that she was really happy with her life, he said there was nothing to forgive her for. He hugged her and started to tell her about the songs he was working on. She said she’d like to hear them some time and, as if he’d been waiting for someone to ask, he produced a guitar from behind the couch in the office. She spent an hour there, listening to his love songs about a girl he hadn’t found yet and hoping that he met her soon. He drove her to Pop’s in his pickup and when Jug came out they shook hands and then shoulder bumped in some kind of male ritual that she didn’t understand. “You treat her right, you hear?” Archie cautioned him as they got on the bike and Jughead suppressed his smile at the ridiculousness of it all and said sincerely that he would do his level best. 

Now he was striding towards them from the tent, holding his arms out for hugs from everyone, relief on his handsome face. Betty kissed him, whispering, “You were great. Well done. I love you.” From a distance away they heard a banshee screech and two little dark haired girls were barrelling at them, followed by a breathless and red faced grandfather. 

“Ok, take ‘em back,” FP gasped. “I’m done. They’ve broken their grandpa. It’s pretty clear these two take after their mommy. Your daddy just used to sit quietly and read when he was little. Guess I was pretty lucky to be your daddy's daddy wasn't I? Come here son.” He pulled his boy into his arms and Betty swallowed the lump in her throat to put her arms around both of them, while her daughters struggled into the middle of the family hug.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you would like to see a wall of death act then I based Jug’s performance on this video: https://youtu.be/uBiWeXQhPeU
> 
> So this story was inspired by David Foster Wallace’s piece about the Illinois State Fair. He writes about the idea of tribes “othering” different people to reinforce their identity. There are references in the story too; it’s why FP gets blitzed on peppermint schnapps and it’s the source for the slogan t shirt. I also gave Jug DFW’s agent and publishing firm. If you’d like to read what a good writer can do with that material then it’s here.  
> https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1994-07-0001729.pdf
> 
> By the way I often make a joke about people who read David Foster Wallace as a kind of shorthand for literary pretension. It’s true that some terrible people like him but he was a really wonderful writer. If you aren’t already a fan I’d really recommend the non fiction. He was a genius and it makes me sad that we didn’t get all the wonderful books he would have gone on to write. Depression is such an absolute fucker isn’t it?


End file.
